Robot Morphology-Control Co-Design

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Overview

Robot morphology-control co-design studies how a robot’s shape, materials, actuators, and control policy can be designed together, since each constrains what the others can achieve. Common approaches include evolutionary and Bayesian search, bilevel reinforcement learning, and differentiable simulation or learned latent spaces that make design exploration more efficient. These methods are used across soft and legged robots, hands and tools, and aerial systems, with evaluations ranging from simulated locomotion benchmarks to fabricated robots and real-world tasks. A central challenge is finding designs that remain robust and manufacturable beyond their training conditions, while making comparisons fair across different controllers, search budgets, and benchmarks.

Latest papers

CardsList

60 papers11 papers in the last four weeks, up 10% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Communicative Efficiency of Single vs. Multi-Axis Robot Neck Motion

    Jul 8, 2026Chapa Sirithunge, Haewon Jeong, Qinghua Guan +2Robot Morphology-Control Co-DesignRobotics

    University of Bristol School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology, Tankard’s Close, Bristol BS8 1TW, UK · EPFL Institute of Mechanical Engineering, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland · University of Tokyo Department of Precision Engineering, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan

  2. Rapid co-design of Buoyancy-assisted robots for Challenging Locomotion using Gaussian Evolutionary Specialists

    Jun 5, 2026Ankit Sinha, Nitish Sontakke, Dennis Hong +2Legged RoboticsRobot Morphology-Control Co-Design

    School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, TSRB 85 5th St NW, Atlanta, GA - 30332, USA · Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, 420 Westwood Plaza, CA 90095, USA · Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, Leonhardstrasse 21, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland

  3. Extreme dynamic symmetry enables omnidirectional and multifunctional robots

    May 28, 2026Jiaxun Liu, Boxi Xia, Boyuan ChenRobot Morphology-Control Co-DesignRobotics

    Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Duke University · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University · Department of Computer Science, Duke University

  4. ECo-MoE: Embodiment-Conditioned Mixture of Experts Increases the Evolvability of Robots

    May 22, 2026Yibin Wang, Muhan Li, Zihan Guo +1Robot Morphology-Control Co-DesignMixture of Experts

    Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.

  5. COSMIC: Concurrent Optimization of Structure, Material, and Integrated Control for robotic systems

    May 12, 2026Qinsong Guo, Liwei WangTopology OptimizationRobot Morphology-Control Co-Design

    Dept. of Mechanical Engineering Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213

  6. Evolving the Complete Muscle: Efficient Morphology-Control Co-design for Musculoskeletal Locomotion

    Apr 14, 2026Lidong Sun, Wentao Zhao, Ye Wang +2Robot Morphology-Control Co-DesignRobotics

    Naval University of Engineering, Wuhan 430033, China · Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

  7. Social Learning Strategies for Evolved Virtual Soft Robots

    Apr 14, 2026K. Ege de Bruin, Kyrre Glette, Kai Olav Ellefsen +2Evolutionary RoboticsRobot Morphology-Control Co-Design

    Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway · Also with RITMO, University of Oslo. · University Toulouse Capitole, IRIT - CNRS UMR5505, Toulouse, France +1

  8. A Foot Resistive Force Model for Legged Locomotion on Muddy Terrains

    Apr 13, 2026Xunjie Chen, Liuyin Wang, Xinyan Huang +3Robot LocomotionTerrain-Aware Robot Locomotion

    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA · Department of Electrical and Biomedical Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557 USA

  9. Identifying and Exploiting Structure in Robot Co-Design

    Apr 13, 2026Apoorv Vaish, Oliver BrockRobot Morphology-Control Co-DesignRobotic Manipulation

    Robotics and Biology Laboratory, Technische Universität Berlin · Science of Intelligence (SCIoI), Cluster of Excellence, Berlin · Robotics Institute Germany (RIG)

  10. LEGO: Latent-space Exploration for Geometry-aware Optimization of Humanoid Kinematic Design

    Apr 9, 2026Jihwan Yoon, Taemoon Jeong, Jeongeun Park +5Robot Morphology-Control Co-DesignHumanoid Robotics

    Department of Artificial Intelligence, Korea University, Seoul 02841, Republic of Korea · Contoro Robotics, Austin, TX 78758, USA · Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA +1

  11. EvoGymCM: Harnessing Continuous Material Stiffness for Soft Robot Co-Design

    Apr 9, 2026Le Shen, Kangyao Huang, Wentao Zhao +1Soft RoboticsRobot Morphology-Control Co-Design

    College of Control Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University. · Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University.

  12. Physical Imitation Learning: Distilling Control Policies into Passive Elasticity

    Apr 1, 2026Huyue Ma, Yurui Jin, Helmut Hauser +1Energy-Efficient Robot LocomotionRobot Morphology-Control Co-Design

    School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology, University of Bristol, and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, BS8 1QU, United Kingdom

  13. SwarmCoDe: A Scalable Co-Design Framework for Heterogeneous Robot Swarms via Dynamic Speciation

    Mar 27, 2026Andrew Wilhelm, Josie HughesSwarm RoboticsEvolutionary Robotics

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

  14. Generalized Task-Driven Design of Soft Robots via Reduced-Order FEM-based Surrogate Modeling

    Mar 20, 2026Yao Yao, David Howard, Perla MaiolinoSoft RoboticsSurrogate Modeling

    Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford, UK · CSIRO Robotics, CSIRO, Australia

  15. Evolving Embodied Intelligence: Graph Neural Network--Driven Co-Design of Morphology and Control in Soft Robotics

    Mar 20, 2026Jianqiang Wang, Shuaiqun Pan, Alvaro Serra-Gomez +2Robot Morphology-Control Co-DesignRobot Policy Adaptation

    LIACS, Leiden University · School of Mechanical Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University · Department of Computer Science, Loughborough University

  16. Efficient and Versatile Quadrupedal Skating: Optimal Co-design via Reinforcement Learning and Bayesian Optimization

    Mar 19, 2026Hanwen Wang, Zhenlong Fang, Josiah Hanna +1Robot Morphology-Control Co-DesignQuadruped Locomotion

    Hanwen Wang, Zhenlong Fang, and Josiah Hanna are with the University of Wisconsin - Madison. · Xiaobin Xiong was with the University of Wisconsin - Madison, and now with the Shanghai Innovation Institute (SII).

  17. Reconciling distributed compliance with high-performance control in continuum soft robotics

    Mar 17, 2026Vito Daniele Perfetta, Daniel Feliu-Talegon, Ebrahim Shahabi +1Continuum Robot ControlSoft Robotics

    Cognitive Robotics Department, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Delft 2628 CD, The Netherlands.

  18. Efficient Morphology-Control Co-Design via Stackelberg Proximal Policy Optimization

    Mar 16, 2026Yanning Dai, Yuhui Wang, Dylan R. Ashley +1Robot Morphology-Control Co-DesignBilevel Optimization

    Center of Excellence for Generative AI, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. · Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Research (IDSIA), Lugano, Switzerland. · Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland. +1

  19. Robots that redesign themselves through kinematic self-destruction

    Mar 12, 2026Chen Yu, Sam KriegmanRoboticsRobot Morphology-Control Co-Design

    Northwestern University

  20. Robust Co-design Optimisation for Agile Fixed-Wing UAVs

    Mar 11, 2026Adrian Andrei Buda, Xavier Chen, Nicolò Botteghi +1Robot Morphology-Control Co-DesignAerial Robotics

    Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London, United Kingdom · Department of Mathematics, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

  21. Embodied Human Simulation for Quantitative Design and Analysis of Interactive Robotics

    Mar 10, 2026Chenhui Zuo, Jinhao Xu, Michael Qian Vergnolle +1Musculoskeletal ModelingRobotics

    The authors are with the School of Aerospace Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China 100084.

  22. Unifying Sidewinding and Rolling: A Wave-Based Framework for Self-Righting in Elongated Limbless and Multi-Legged Robots

    Mar 8, 2026Hangjun Liu, Jiarui Geng, Jinxuan Ding +7Legged RoboticsRobot Locomotion

  23. A Unified Low-Dimensional Design Embedding for Joint Optimization of Shape, Material, and Actuation in Soft Robots

    Mar 6, 2026Vittorio Candiello, Manuel Mekkattu, Mike Y. Michelis +1Soft RoboticsRobot Morphology-Control Co-Design

    Soft Robotics Lab, D-MAVT, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. · ETH AI Center, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

  24. Neural-Surrogate Co-Design of Aerodynamic Shape and Control

    Mar 6, 2026Daniele Affinita, Mingda Xu, Benoît Valentin Gherardi +1Robot Morphology-Control Co-DesignAerial Robotics

    École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

  25. System Design of the Ultra Mobility Vehicle: A Driving, Balancing, and Jumping Bicycle Robot

    Feb 25, 2026Benjamin Bokser, Daniel Gonzalez, Aaron Preston +39Robot LocomotionRobot Morphology-Control Co-Design

  26. Bumper Drone: Elastic Morphology Design for Aerial Physical Interaction

    Feb 21, 2026Pongporn Supa, Alex Dunnett, Feng Xiao +3Aerial RoboticsRobot Morphology-Control Co-Design

    School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology, University of Bristol. · School of Civil, Aerospace and Design Engineering, University of Bristol. · Department of Aeronautics, Imperial College London, London, UK. +1

  27. Latent Diffeomorphic Co-Design of End-Effectors for Deformable and Fragile Object Manipulation

    Feb 20, 2026Kei Ikemura, Yifei Dong, Florian T. PokornyRobot Morphology-Control Co-DesignDeformable Object Manipulation

  28. House of Dextra: Cross-embodied Co-design for Dexterous Hands

    Dec 3, 2025Kehlani Fay, Darin Anthony Djapri, Anya Zorin +6Robotic Hand DesignDexterous Manipulation

    University of California, San Diego · University of California, Santa Barbara

  29. Debate2Create: Robot Co-design via Multi-Agent LLM Debate

    Oct 29, 2025Kevin Qiu, Marek CyganRobot Morphology-Control Co-DesignMulti-Agent Debate

    University of Warsaw · 2IDEAS NCBR · 3Nomagic

  30. Toward Physical Recursive Self-Improvement: A Call for Body-Control Co-Design for Humanoid Robot

    Oct 3, 2025Guiliang Liu, Bo Yue, Yi Jin Kim +1Robot Morphology-Control Co-DesignHumanoid Robotics

    The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen) · DexForce Technology