Claire chatted to Chenying Liu from University of Oxford about how a robot's physical form can actively contribute to sensing, processing, decision-making, and movement. Chenying Liu is a Junior Research Fellow and an Associate Member of Faculty in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. She leads an independent research programme focused on embodied physical intelligence, exploring how robot design can integrate geometry, materials, and control to enhance autonomy and robustness. Her work aims to develop more efficient and resilient robotic systems by embedding intelligence directly into their physical structures. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines.

Moreover, Evolution Gym is easy to use.

However, while optimal control is well studied in the machine learning and robotics community, less attention is placed on finding the optimal robot design. This is mainly because co-optimizing design and control in robotics is characterized as a challenging problem, and more importantly, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for co-optimization does not exist. In this paper, we propose Evolution Gym, the first large-scale benchmark for co-optimizing the design and control of soft robots. In our benchmark, each robot is composed of different types of voxels (e.g., soft, rigid, actuators), resulting in a modular and expressive robot design space. Our benchmark environments span a wide range of tasks, including locomotion on various types of terrains and manipulation.

Humanoid robots represent a central frontier in embodied intelligence, as their anthropomorphic form enables natural deployment in humans' workspace. Brain-body co-design for humanoids presents a promising approach to realizing this potential by jointly optimizing control policies and physical morphology. Within this context, fall recovery emerges as a critical capability. It not only enhances safety and resilience but also integrates naturally with locomotion systems, thereby advancing the autonomy of humanoids. In this paper, we propose RoboCraft, a scalable humanoid co-design framework for fall recovery that iteratively improves performance through the coupled updates of control policy and morphology. A shared policy pretrained across multiple designs is progressively finetuned on high-performing morphologies, enabling efficient adaptation without retraining from scratch. Concurrently, morphology search is guided by human-inspired priors and optimization algorithms, supported by a priority buffer that balances reevaluation of promising candidates with the exploration of novel designs. Experiments show that RoboCraft achieves an average performance gain of 44.55% on seven public humanoid robots, with morphology optimization drives at least 40% of improvements in co-designing four humanoid robots, underscoring the critical role of humanoid co-design.

Automating the co-design of a robot's morphology and control is a long-standing challenge due to the vast design space and the tight coupling between body and behavior. We introduce Debate2Create (D2C), a framework in which large language model (LLM) agents engage in a structured dialectical debate to jointly optimize a robot's design and its reward function. In each round, a design agent proposes targeted morphological modifications, and a control agent devises a reward function tailored to exploit the new design. A panel of pluralistic judges then evaluates the design-control pair in simulation and provides feedback that guides the next round of debate. Through iterative debates, the agents progressively refine their proposals, producing increasingly effective robot designs. Notably, D2C yields diverse and specialized morphologies despite no explicit diversity objective. On a quadruped locomotion benchmark, D2C discovers designs that travel 73% farther than the default, demonstrating that structured LLM-based debate can serve as a powerful mechanism for emergent robot co-design. Our results suggest that multi-agent debate, when coupled with physics-grounded feedback, is a promising new paradigm for automated robot design.

Moreover, Evolution Gym is easy to use.

Humanoid robots have seen significant advancements in both design and control, with a growing emphasis on integrating these aspects to enhance overall performance. Traditionally, robot design has followed a sequential process, where control algorithms are developed after the hardware is finalized. However, this can be myopic and prevent robots to fully exploit their hardware capabilities. Recent approaches advocate for co-design, optimizing both design and control in parallel to maximize robotic capabilities. This paper presents the Evolutionary Continuous Adaptive RL-based Co-Design (EA-CoRL) framework, which combines reinforcement learning (RL) with evolutionary strategies to enable continuous adaptation of the control policy to the hardware. EA-CoRL comprises two key components: Design Evolution, which explores the hardware choices using an evolutionary algorithm to identify efficient configurations, and Policy Continuous Adaptation, which fine-tunes a task-specific control policy across evolving designs to maximize performance rewards. We evaluate EA-CoRL by co-designing the actuators (gear ratios) and control policy of the RH5 humanoid for a highly dynamic chin-up task, previously unfeasible due to actuator limitations. Comparative results against state-of-the-art RL-based co-design methods show that EA-CoRL achieves higher fitness score and broader design space exploration, highlighting the critical role of continuous policy adaptation in robot co-design.

Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal performance, as general-purpose designs fail to exploit particularities of tasks. The development of custom, task-tailored robots is hindered by long, cost-intensive development cycles and the high cost of customized hardware. Recently, various computational design methods have been devised to overcome the bottleneck of human engineering. In addition, a surge of modular robots allows quick and economical adaptation to changing industrial settings. This work proposes an approach to automatically designing and optimizing robot morphologies tailored to a specific environment. To this end, we learn the inverse kinematics for a wide range of different manipulators. A fully differentiable framework realizes gradient-based fine-tuning of designed robots and inverse kinematics solutions. Our generative approach accelerates the generation of specialized designs from hours with optimization-based methods to seconds, serving as a design co-pilot that enables instant adaptation and effective human-AI collaboration. Numerical experiments show that our approach finds robots that can navigate cluttered environments, manipulators that perform well across a specified workspace, and can be adapted to different hardware constraints. Finally, we demonstrate the real-world applicability of our method by setting up a modular robot designed in simulation that successfully moves through an obstacle course.