On Designing a Learning Robot: Improving Morphology for Enhanced Task Performance and Learning

Maks Sorokin, Chuyuan Fu, Jie Tan, C. Karen Liu, Yunfei Bai, Wenlong Lu, Sehoon Ha, Mohi Khansari

International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2023

Abstract

We present a learning-oriented morphology optimization framework that accounts for the interplay between the robot's morphology, onboard perception abilities, and their interaction in different tasks. We find that morphologies optimized holistically improve the robot performance by 15-20% on various manipulation tasks, and require 25x less data to match human-expert made morphology performance.