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

Robot swarms offer inherent robustness and the capacity to execute complex, collaborative tasks surpassing the capabilities of single-agent systems. Co-designing these systems is critical, as marginal improvements in individual performance or unit cost compound significantly at scale. However, under traditional frameworks, this scale renders co-design intractable due to exponentially large, non-intuitive design spaces. To address this, we propose SwarmCoDe, a novel Collaborative Co-Evolutionary Algorithm (CCEA) that utilizes dynamic speciation to automatically scale swarm heterogeneity to match task complexity. Inspired by biological signaling mechanisms for inter-species cooperation, the algorithm uses evolved genetic tags and a selectivity gene to facilitate the emergent identification of symbiotically beneficial partners without predefined species boundaries. Additionally, an evolved dominance gene dictates the relative swarm composition, decoupling the physical swarm size from the evolutionary population. We apply SwarmCoDe to simultaneously optimize task planning and hardware morphology under fabrication budgets, successfully evolving specialized swarms of up to 200 agents -- four times the size of the evolutionary population. This framework provides a scalable, computationally viable pathway for the holistic co-design of large-scale, heterogeneous robot swarms.

Monotone Subsystem Decomposition for Efficient Multi-Objective Robot Design

Automating design minimizes errors, accelerates the design process, and reduces cost. However, automating robot design is challenging due to recursive constraints, multiple design objectives, and cross-domain design complexity possibly spanning multiple abstraction layers. Here we look at the problem of component selection, a combinatorial optimization problem in which a designer, given a robot model, must select compatible components from an extensive catalog. The goal is to satisfy high-level task specifications while optimally balancing trade-offs between competing design objectives. In this paper, we extend our previous constraint programming approach to multi-objective design problems and propose the novel technique of monotone subsystem decomposition to efficiently compute a Pareto front of solutions for large-scale problems. We prove that subsystems can be optimized for their Pareto fronts and, under certain conditions, these results can be used to determine a globally optimal Pareto front. Furthermore, subsystems serve as an intuitive design abstraction and can be reused across various design problems. Using an example quadcopter design problem, we compare our method to a linear programming approach and demonstrate our method scales better for large catalogs, solving a multi-objective problem of 10^25 component combinations in seconds. We then expand the original problem and solve a task-oriented, multi-objective design problem to build a fleet of quadcopters to deliver packages. We compute a Pareto front of solutions in seconds where each solution contains an optimal component-level design and an optimal package delivery schedule for each quadcopter.

Autonomous sPOMDP Environment Modeling With Partial Model Exploitation

A state space representation of an environment is a classic and yet powerful tool used by many autonomous robotic systems for efficient and often optimal solution planning. However, designing these representations with high performance is laborious and costly, necessitating an effective and versatile tool for autonomous generation of state spaces for autonomous robots. We present a novel state space exploration algorithm by extending the original surprise-based partially-observable Markov Decision Processes (sPOMDP), and demonstrate its effective long-term exploration planning performance in various environments. Through extensive simulation experiments, we show the proposed model significantly increases efficiency and scalability of the original sPOMDP learning techniques with a range of 31-63% gain in training speed while improving robustness in environments with less deterministic transitions. Our results pave the way for extending sPOMDP solutions to a broader set of environments.