3 research outputs found
Interactive Co-Design of Form and Function for Legged Robots using the Adjoint Method
Our goal is to make robotics more accessible to casual users by reducing the
domain knowledge required in designing and building robots. Towards this goal,
we present an interactive computational design system that enables users to
design legged robots with desired morphologies and behaviors by specifying
higher level descriptions. The core of our method is a design optimization
technique that reasons about the structure, and motion of a robot in coupled
manner in order to achieve user-specified robot behavior, and performance. We
are inspired by the recent works that also aim to jointly optimize robot's form
and function. However, through efficient computation of necessary design
changes, our approach enables us to keep user-in-the-loop for interactive
applications. We evaluate our system in simulation by automatically improving
robot designs for multiple scenarios. Starting with initial user designs that
are physically infeasible or inadequate to perform the user-desired task, we
show optimized designs that achieve user-specifications, all while ensuring an
interactive design flow.Comment: 8 pages; added link of the accompanying vide
Interactive Co-Design Of Form And Function For Legged Robots Using The Adjoint Method
Our goal is to make robotics more accessible to casual users by reducing the domain knowledge required in designing and building robots. Towards this goal, we present an interactive computational design system that enables users to design legged robots with desired morphologies and behaviors by specify- ing higher level descriptions. The core of our method is a design optimization technique that reasons about the structure and motion of a robot in a coupled manner to achieve user-speci ed robot behavior and performance. We are in- spired by the recent works that also aim to jointly optimize robot's form and function. However, through eficient computation of necessary design changes, our approach enables us to keep user-in-the-loop for interactive applications. We evaluate our system in simulation by starting with initial user designs that are physically infeasible or inadequate to perform the user-desired task. We then show optimized designs that achieve user-speci cations, all while ensur- ing an interactive design ow
Co-Designing Robots by Differentiating Motion Solvers
We present a novel algorithm for the computational co-design of legged robots
and dynamic maneuvers. Current state-of-the-art approaches are based on random
sampling or concurrent optimization. A few recently proposed methods explore
the relationship between the gradient of the optimal motion and robot design.
Inspired by these approaches, we propose a bilevel optimization approach that
exploits the derivatives of the motion planning sub-problem (the inner level)
without simplifying assumptions on its structure. Our approach can quickly
optimize the robot's morphology while considering its full dynamics, joint
limits and physical constraints such as friction cones. It has a faster
convergence rate and greater scalability for larger design problems than
state-of-the-art approaches based on sampling methods. It also allows us to
handle constraints such as the actuation limits, which are important for
co-designing dynamic maneuvers. We demonstrate these capabilities by studying
jumping and trotting gaits under different design metrics and verify our
results in a physics simulator. For these cases, our algorithm converges in
less than a third of the number of iterations needed for sampling approaches,
and the computation time scales linearly.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IROS 202