Justifying bio-inspired robotics research: A taxonomy of strategies

Biologically-inspired AI agent frameworks claim reliability benefits through structural guarantees adapted from gene regulatory networks, immune systems, and metabolic control. These claims are rarely tested empirically against simpler alternatives. We present three deep benchmarks: metabolic priority gating, autoinducer-based quorum sensing, and Bayesian stagnation detection, each comparing a biologically-grounded implementation against a naive non-biological alternative and an ablated control, across 1,000 trials per seed and 10 seeds (10M+ data points total).

When designing robots' nonverbal behaviors, many researchers have turned to arts-based insights, such as Disney's Animation Principles. Yet, while these principles bear key insights into the design of like-life characters, their application to robot design is inherently limited, in part because animation is not constrained by real-world physics, and in part because animation principles focus on low level animation mechanics and not high-level design considerations for physically embodied, interactive characters. In contrast, little attention has been paid to art forms like puppetry, despite their long history of exploring morphological, behavior, and interaction design of physically embodied, interactive characters. As such, in this work we leverage puppetry texts and practicing puppeteers' expert knowledge knowledge to derive a set of puppetry principles with key insights for robot design. As we show, these insights go beyond -- and uniquely complement -- the prior insights provided by theater, dance, and animation.

While Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) and Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP) are widely used paradigms in robot control, few systematic studies have been performed on the relative merits of large parameter spaces. In contexts where input and output spaces are small and performance is bounded, having more parameters to optimize may actively hinder the learning process instead of empowering it. To empirically measure this, we submit a given robot morphology, with limited proprioceptive capabilities, to controller optimization under two bio-inspired paradigms (CPGs and MLPs) with evolutionary- and reinforcement- trainer protocols. By varying parameter spaces across multiple reward functions, we observe that shallow MLPs and densely connected CPGs result in better performance when compared to deeper MLPs or Actor-Critic architectures. To account for the relationship between said performance and the number of parameters, we introduce a Parameter Impact metric which demonstrates that the additional parameters required by the reinforcement technique do not translate into better performance, thus favouring evolutionary strategies.