{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/data-efficient-learning-of-morphology-and","title":"Data-efficient Learning of Morphology and Controller for a Microrobot","arxiv_id":"1905.01334","date":"2019-05-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Thomas Liao","Grant Wang","Brian Yang","Rene Lee","Kristofer Pister","Sergey Levine","Roberto Calandra"],"abstract":"Robot design is often a slow and difficult process requiring the iterative construction and testing of prototypes, with the goal of sequentially optimizing the design. For most robots, this process is further complicated by the need, when validating the capabilities of the hardware to solve the desired task, to already have an appropriate controller, which is in turn designed and tuned for the specific hardware. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, HPC-BBO, to efficiently and automatically design hardware configurations, and evaluate them by also automatically tuning the corresponding controller. HPC-BBO is based on a hierarchical Bayesian optimization process which iteratively optimizes morphology configurations (based on the performance of the previous designs during the controller learning process) and subsequently learns the corresponding controllers (exploiting the knowledge collected from optimizing for previous morphologies). Moreover, HPC-BBO can select a \"batch\" of multiple morphology designs at once, thus parallelizing hardware validation and reducing the number of time-consuming production cycles. We validate HPC-BBO on the design of the morphology and controller for a simulated 6-legged microrobot. Experimental results show that HPC-BBO outperforms multiple competitive baselines, and yields a $360\\%$ reduction in production cycles over standard Bayesian optimization, thus reducing the hypothetical manufacturing time of our microrobot from 21 to 4 months.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.01334v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.01334v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"data-efficient-learning-of-morphology-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/tholiao/learning-morph-and-ctrl","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"bayesian-optimization","task_name":"Bayesian Optimization"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1905.01334","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1905.01334"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/tholiao/learning-morph-and-ctrl","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"listed":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"6c8f28c516ca3874","entry":"is_1D","repo":"tholiao/learning-morph-and-ctrl","repo_kind":"listed","path":"objectives/hw_sw_v2.py","file_url":"https://github.com/tholiao/learning-morph-and-ctrl/blob/HEAD/objectives/hw_sw_v2.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"6c8f28c516ca3874"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}