Identifying Inductive Biases for Robot Co-Design

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Vaish, Apoorv, Brock, Oliver
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Vaish, Apoorv
Brock, Oliver
author_facet Vaish, Apoorv
Brock, Oliver
contents Co-designing a robot's morphology and control can ensure synergistic interactions between them, prevalent in biological organisms. However, co-design is a high-dimensional search problem. To make this search tractable, we need a systematic method for identifying inductive biases tailored to its structure. In this paper, we analyze co-design landscapes for soft locomotion and manipulation tasks and identify three patterns that are consistent across regions of their co-design spaces. We observe that within regions of co-design space, quality varies along a low-dimensional manifold. Higher-quality regions exhibit variations spread across more dimensions, while tightly coupling morphology and control. We leverage these insights to devise an efficient co-design algorithm. Since the precise instantiation of this structure varies across tasks and is not known a priori, our algorithm infers it from information gathered during search and adapts to each task's specific structure. This yields $36\%$ more improvement than benchmark algorithms. Moreover, our algorithm achieved more than two orders of magnitude in sample efficiency compared to these benchmark algorithms, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging inductive biases to co-design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_11768
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Identifying Inductive Biases for Robot Co-Design
Vaish, Apoorv
Brock, Oliver
Robotics
Co-designing a robot's morphology and control can ensure synergistic interactions between them, prevalent in biological organisms. However, co-design is a high-dimensional search problem. To make this search tractable, we need a systematic method for identifying inductive biases tailored to its structure. In this paper, we analyze co-design landscapes for soft locomotion and manipulation tasks and identify three patterns that are consistent across regions of their co-design spaces. We observe that within regions of co-design space, quality varies along a low-dimensional manifold. Higher-quality regions exhibit variations spread across more dimensions, while tightly coupling morphology and control. We leverage these insights to devise an efficient co-design algorithm. Since the precise instantiation of this structure varies across tasks and is not known a priori, our algorithm infers it from information gathered during search and adapts to each task's specific structure. This yields $36\%$ more improvement than benchmark algorithms. Moreover, our algorithm achieved more than two orders of magnitude in sample efficiency compared to these benchmark algorithms, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging inductive biases to co-design.
title Identifying Inductive Biases for Robot Co-Design
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.11768