Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological counterparts, legged machines have largely converged over the past decade to canonical quadrupedal and bipedal architectures that cannot be easily reconfigured to meet new tasks or recover from injury. Here we introduce autonomous modular legs: agile yet minimal, single-degree-of-freedom jointed links that can learn complex dynamic behaviors and may be freely attached to form multilegged machines at the meter scale. This enables rapid repair, redesign, and recombination of highly-dynamic modular agents that move quickly and acrobatically (non-quasistatically) through unstructured environments. Because each module is itself a complete agent, the bodies that contain them can sustain deep structural damage that would completely disable other legged robots. We also show how to encode the vast space of possible body configurations into a compact latent design space that can be efficiently explored, revealing a wide diversity of novel legged forms.

翻译：腿式机器正变得越来越敏捷和自适应，但迄今为止仍缺乏腿式动物的形态多样性——后者经过数百万年的重组与重塑，已适应了无数生态位。与它们的生物对应物不同，腿式机器在过去十年中主要趋同于标准的四足和双足架构，这些架构难以重新配置以适应新任务或从损伤中恢复。本文提出自主模块化腿部：一种敏捷而极简的单自由度铰接连杆结构，能够学习复杂的动态行为，并可自由连接以构建米尺度的多足机器。这使得高度动态的模块化智能体能够快速修复、重新设计和重组，并在非结构化环境中快速且杂技般地（非准静态地）移动。由于每个模块本身即是一个完整的智能体，包含它们的机体能够承受足以使其他腿式机器人完全瘫痪的深度结构损伤。我们还展示了如何将庞大的可能身体构型空间编码为紧凑的潜在设计空间，该空间可被高效探索，从而揭示出广泛多样的新型腿式形态。