用高斯专家系统加速浮力辅助机器人的形态与控制协同设计。
Rapid co-design of Buoyancy-assisted robots for Challenging Locomotion using Gaussian Evolutionary Specialists

- 将设计空间划分为高斯区域,为每个区域分配专用策略。
- 实测性能提升25%,硬件突破24厘米障碍,效率提升37%。
- 适合需快速迭代复杂机器人设计的研究者和工程师。
设计高性能腿式机器人需要联合优化形态与控制。基于模型的强化学习(RL)可无需显式定义动力学直接训练鲁棒控制器,常用于控制器训练与形态评估。然而,将RL用于协同设计的内层优化代价高昂,因需反复训练策略。通用策略虽能适应不同形态,但易出现行为多样性崩溃,收敛至单一次优策略。而端到端的混合专家(MoE)架构也面临表示崩溃问题。本文提出高斯进化专家(GES)框架,通过解耦设计空间划分与策略学习,显式捕捉多样化行为。GES将专用策略分配给不断进化的高斯区域,并通过训练、探测与领地扩展迭代优化。最终生成的专家策略被整合进设计采样循环,替代耗时的重新训练,实现直接评估。在浮力辅助轻型腿部单元(BALLU)上测试,GES发现的方案性能较朴素通用策略提升5%-25%。硬件实测中,优化设计成功跨越24厘米障碍,相较基线提升3倍。此外,设计优化时间缩短37%。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Designing high-performance legged robots requires jointly optimizing morphology and control. Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers an alternative to model-predictive control for developing robust controllers without explicitly specifying robot dynamics. Thus, we have seen theuse of RL to train controllers and evaluate designs for robot morphology optimization. While RL has shown success inlocomotion, using it in the co-design inner loop is expensive due to repeated policy training. Universal policies conditioned on morphology offer a promising alternative, but suffer from behavioral diversity collapse, converging to a single strategy that performs sub-optimally across designs. On the other hand, end-to-end Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures fail due to a collapse in its representation. We propose Gaussian Evolutionary Specialists (GES), a framework that decouples design-space partitioning from policy learning to capture diverse behaviors explicitly. GES assigns specialist policies to evolving Gaussian regions and iteratively refines them via training, probing, and territory expansion. The resulting specialists are integrated into a design sampling loop, replacing costly re-training with direct evaluation. When tested on the Buoyancy-Assisted Light Legged Unit (BALLU), GES discovers designs with 5 - 25% higher performance than naive universal policies. On hardware, a GES optimized design overcomes a 24 cm tall obstacle - 3x improvement over the baseline BALLU design. Moreover, GES curtails design optimization time by 37%.
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