BRISA Reading Group 05 - Embodied Intelligence via Learning and Evolution

​The reading group is back! This time we will look at the paper Embodied Intelligence via Learning and Evolution from Stanford and published in Nature.

​Most robot learning treats the body as fixed and asks how to learn a controller for it. This paper makes the body part of the search.

​An outer evolutionary loop mutates simulated creatures by adding, deleting and reshaping their limbs and joints.
An inner RL loop then trains a controller for each new body from scratch. How well that controller performs at the end of training decides whether the body gets passed on.

​Nothing learned is inherited. Every child starts with a randomly initialised controller, and nothing in the setup rewards learning quickly. Even so, within ten generations, the training time needed to reach a fixed level of performance drops by half.

​So should we keep designing robot bodies by hand and learn only the controller, or should the body be learned too?

​No preparation needed - just bring your interest in Robotics!

​Come with questions, disagreements, or your own take on how much of intelligence lives in the body.

​🎟️ There are only a limited number of spots, so we can keep the session personal and interactive. Please register early and only attend if you’ve received a ticket.

​📍 Hosted at the Merantix AI Campus on November 9th. Doors open 18:30, we start at 18:45.

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