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

arXiv (Cornell University)

Abstract

The intelligent behavior of robots does not emerge solely from control systems, but from the tight coupling between body and brain, a principle known as embodied intelligence. Designing soft robots that leverage this interaction remains a significant challenge, particularly when morphology and control require simultaneous optimization. A significant obstacle in this co-design process is that morphological evolution can disrupt learned control strategies, making it difficult to reuse or adapt existing knowledge. We address this by develop a Graph Neural Network-based approach for the co-design of morphology and controller. Each robot is represented as a graph, with a graph attention network (GAT) encoding node features and a pooled representation passed through a multilayer perceptron (MLP) head to produce actuator commands or value estimates. During evolution, inheritance follows a topology-consistent mapping: shared GAT layers are reused, MLP hidden layers are transferred intact, matched actuator outputs are copied, and unmatched ones are randomly initialized and fine-tuned. This morphology-aware policy class lets the controller adapt when the body mutates. On the benchmark, our GAT-based approach achieves higher final fitness and stronger adaptability to morphological variations compared to traditional MLP-only co-design methods. These results indicate that graph-structured policies provide a more effective interface between evolving morphologies and control for embodied intelligence.

Authors 5

1. Jianqiang Wang Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University

2. Shuaiqun Pan Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University

3. Álvaro Serra-Gómez Aachen

   Leiden University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University

4. Xiaohan Wei

   Xi'an Jiaotong University

   Affiliation as printed

   School of Mechanical Engineering , Xi'an Jiaotong University

5. Yue Hong Xie

   Loughborough University

   Affiliation as printed

   Department of Computer Science , Loughborough University