Design, Validation, and Case Studies of 2D-VSR-Sim, an Optimization-friendly Simulator of 2-D Voxel-based Soft Robots

具有可证明最优性的体素软体机器人生成式进化设计

Generative Evolutionary Design of Voxel-Based Soft Robots with Provable Optimality

本文提出MISCO框架，结合深度生成模型与分布估计算法，用于体素软体机器人设计优化，具备理论最优性保证和高效采样能力，实验验证其在多样化任务中的有效性。

Collective control of modular soft robots via embodied Spiking Neural Cellular Automata

Voxel-based Soft Robots (VSRs) are a form of modular soft robots, composed of several deformable cubes, i.e., voxels. Each VSR is thus an ensemble of simple agents, namely the voxels, which must cooperate to give rise to the overall VSR behavior. Within this paradigm, collective intelligence plays a key role in enabling the emerge of coordination, as each voxel is independently controlled, exploiting only the local sensory information together with some knowledge passed from its direct neighbors (distributed or collective control). In this work, we propose a novel form of collective control, i…

RoboLDA：一种用于揭示体素软机器人具身层次结构的概率生成模型

RoboLDA: A Probabilistic Generative Model for Uncovering Embodied Hierarchical Structures in Voxel-based Soft Robots

RoboLDA通过贝叶斯概率模型将体素软机器人形态生成分解为任务-机器人-器官-体素四层层次，利用变分推断提取设计先验，实现零样本设计，性能达进化算法的106.4%。

Evolving Modular Soft Robots without Explicit Inter-Module Communication using Local Self-Attention

Modularity in robotics holds great potential. In principle, modular robots can be disassembled and reassembled in different robots, and possibly perform new tasks. Nevertheless, actually exploiting modularity is yet an unsolved problem: controllers usually rely on inter-module communication, a practical requirement that makes modules not perfectly interchangeable and thus limits their flexibility. Here, we focus on Voxel-based Soft Robots (VSRs), aggregations of mechanically identical elastic blocks. We use the same neural controller inside each voxel, but without any inter-voxel communication…