Creating manufacturable blueprints for coarse-grained virtual robots
This addresses the challenge of realizing evolved virtual agents as physical robots for robotics researchers and engineers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing design automation methods.
The paper tackles the problem of converting abstract virtual robot designs into manufacturable blueprints by automating the mapping from simplified design spaces to complete blueprints, enabling direct fabrication without extensive manual effort.
Over the past three decades, countless embodied yet virtual agents have freely evolved inside computer simulations, but vanishingly few were realized as physical robots. This is because evolution was conducted at a level of abstraction that was convenient for freeform body generation (creation, mutation, recombination) but swept away almost all of the physical details of functional body parts. The resulting designs were crude and underdetermined, requiring considerable effort and expertise to convert into a manufacturable format. Here, we automate this mapping from simplified design spaces that are readily evolvable to complete blueprints that can be directly followed by a builder. The pipeline incrementally resolves manufacturing constraints by embedding the structural and functional semantics of motors, electronics, batteries, and wiring into the abstract virtual design. In lieu of evolution, a user-defined or AI-generated ``sketch'' of a body plan can also be fed as input to the pipeline, providing a versatile framework for accelerating the design of novel robots.