Brain-body co-evolution enables animals to develop complex behaviors in their environments. Inspired by this biological synergy, embodied co-design (ECD) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for creating intelligent agents-from virtual creatures to physical robots-by jointly optimizing their morphologies and controllers rather than treating control in isolation. This integrated approach facilitates richer environmental interactions and robust task performance. In this survey, we provide a systematic overview of recent advances in ECD. We first formalize the concept of ECD and position it within related fields. We then introduce a hierarchical taxonomy: a lower layer that breaks down agent design into three fundamental components-controlling brain, body morphology, and task environment-and an upper layer that integrates these components into four major ECD frameworks: bi-level, single-level, generative, and open-ended. This taxonomy allows us to synthesize insights from more than one hundred recent studies. We further review notable benchmarks, datasets, and applications in both simulated and real-world scenarios. Finally, we identify significant challenges and offer insights into promising future research directions. A project associated with this survey has been created at https://github.com/Yuxing-Wang-THU/SurveyBrainBody.

翻译：脑体协同演化使动物能够在环境中发展出复杂行为。受这种生物协同作用的启发，具身协同设计（ECD）已成为一种变革性范式，用于创建从虚拟生物到物理机器人的智能体——通过联合优化其形态结构与控制器，而非孤立地处理控制问题。这种集成方法促进了更丰富的环境交互和鲁棒的任务性能。在本综述中，我们系统性地概述了ECD领域的最新进展。我们首先形式化ECD的概念，并将其定位在相关研究领域中。随后，我们提出一个分层分类体系：底层将智能体设计分解为三个基本组成部分——控制大脑、身体形态和任务环境；上层则将这些组成部分整合为四种主要的ECD框架：双层优化、单层优化、生成式和开放式框架。该分类体系使我们能够综合来自一百多项近期研究的见解。我们进一步回顾了模拟和现实场景中的代表性基准测试、数据集及应用案例。最后，我们指出了当前面临的重大挑战，并对未来有前景的研究方向提出了见解。与本综述相关的项目已创建于https://github.com/Yuxing-Wang-THU/SurveyBrainBody。