Interactive, iterative robot design

Consider how a new robot is designed. Starting from a relative size (e.g., nanometer, centimeter, meter), the roboticist picks a morphological type (manipulator, quadruped, biped), and then uses intuition, experience, biological inspiration, or some combination of the three to select kinematic, dynamic, and geometric parameters. The designer then conducts preliminary checks to see whether the robot can satisfy its intended function: manipulation, locomotion, or both. The designer then iteratively adjusts the physical parameters and conducts checks using sample tasks, presumably until convergence is reached. This paper describes a means to automate part of this approach by combining interactive elements with powerful tools that use multi-rigid body simulation. We describe and demonstrate a virtual testing phase that first determines whether the physically situated robot would serve its intended purpose. If the robot is not capable of performing its target task, the virtual testing phase can determine which of the robot's morphological parameters should be modified in order to do so. The process keeps a human in the loop to help account for hard to quantify design aspects like appearance, quirks of the fabrication procedure (i.e., laser cutting, milling, 3D printing processes), or even expert knowledge. We intend for the described approach to be used as an interactive tool that gives a robot designer feedback on what morphological parameters are likely to limit the performance of a robot and how to modify the design to fix or offset such limitations. We demonstrate that, through simulated prototyping and testing methods, we can improve a robot design and iteratively locate morphological parameters that make efficient use of available hardware.