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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