PhD candidate @northwesternu. Prev. student researcher @google, alum of @ucberkeley and @utaustin computer science.
Chicago
Joined September 2019
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@iclr_conf this week! P3-1109 at 3:15 on Saturday. Reach out or swing by if you want to hang or talk universal controllers x robot co-design 🦾🇧🇷🏖️ – at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
These robots are going to Rio 🇧🇷
See you at #ICLR2026
New preprint. Accelerated co-design of robots through morphological pretraining. With @Kriegmerica.
We pretrained a universal controller in minutes through differentiable simulation. Then we used it as a prior for zero-shot and few-shot evolution to discover robots like this:
You can read the full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2502.10862
Code is coming soon:
sites.google.com/view/co-des…
And here are more robots!
We found that morphological pretraining was able to unlock successful recombination ("crossover") of substructures across body designs.
Despite each robot being morphologically distinct, typically composed of hundreds of sensors and thousands of motors, they all used the same universal controller.
Here is another robot that evolved. In each of the four panels the robot is shown sensing a randomly placed light source and traversing previously unseen terrain to reach the light.
New preprint. Accelerated co-design of robots through morphological pretraining. With @Kriegmerica.
We pretrained a universal controller in minutes through differentiable simulation. Then we used it as a prior for zero-shot and few-shot evolution to discover robots like this: