A Cross-domain, Computational Robot Design Flow from Morphology to Fabrication

Designing a custom robot can be challenging and interdisciplinary work, potentially requiring expertise across robot architecture and structures, electronics, and controls design. Though recent work presents tools that increasingly automates design in each domain, to build a full robot users must still compose these tools together, including manually translating design data across domains. This can be a nontrivial process requiring interdisciplinary expertise and opening opportunities for human error. In this work, we propose a novel design workflow leveraging and combining recent work across robot structures generation, high-level circuit board design, and controls synthesis. Crucially, beyond making the design of each individual aspect easier, our system automatically manages the difficult seams between domains, for example, generating the circuit board requirements from the robot architecture. We demonstrate its effectiveness with a family of custom robots that we have fabricated and tested, including wheeled, crawling, and hybrid designs with custom circuit boards and auto-synthesized controllers tuned specifically for its kinematics.