AI & ML
From Biological Curves to Soft Modular Robots: Learning-Based Inverse Design with Uncertainty-Guided Refinement
arXiv cs.RO0 views
arXiv:2610.36681v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Animals exhibit diverse shape-changing behaviors, from the undulatory swimming of eels to the arching movements of inchworms. Reproducing these biological shapes with modular soft robots offers a promising approach to developing versatile bioinspired robotic systems. However, translating a desired shape into a feasible robotic configuration remains challenging. Existing cable-driven modular soft robots rely on computationally expensive physics-based modeling and combinatorial search for inverse design, making it difficult to efficiently reproduce diverse target shapes. To address this challenge, we present a learning-based real-to-sim-to-real framework that translates biological curves into robotic configurations through surrogate-assisted inverse design and uncertainty-guided refinement. The proposed method combines learned inverse prediction with targeted candidate exploration, using a fast forward surrogate to evaluate and select suitable designs. The learned forward surrogate reduces deformation prediction time from $1.53 \times 10^5$ ms to 0.0008 ms, achieving approximately a $1.9 \times 10^8$-fold speedup. At the same time, the proposed inverse design method reduces design time from $1.99 \times 10^6$ ms to 4.18 ms. On 5,000 test samples generated from previously unseen threading patterns, the method achieves a 93% shape reconstruction success rate under surrogate-based evaluation. Physical demonstrations with four bioinspired robots further illustrate the translation of biological curves into realizable robotic shapes.
Source:https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36681PreviousSWIM: Learning What Matters from Behaviors for JEPA World ModelsNextRoboSTD: Zero-Shot Single-to-Dual Transfer via Sagittal Mirroring for Bimanual Learning
Related posts
Introducing the Grid Protectors Program
0OpenAI Blog
The world has a new plan to save nature, but it still needs the money
0Ars Technica

Could data center backlash flip Florida?
0The Verge

Vivo’s first Pro Max phone proves its Ultra is still in a league of its own
0The Verge

Why Peacock is making a huge bet on YouTube
0The Verge
Ninja’s first-ever microwave just replaced two of my kitchen appliances at once
0TechCrunch