Natural Selection via Foundation Models for Soft Robot Evolution

Abstract

Designing soft robots is a complex and iterative process that demands cross-disciplinary expertise in materials science, mechanics, and control, often relying on intuition and extensive experimentation. While foundation models, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities, their capacity to conduct embodied design remains largely unexplored. This paper introduces RoboCrafter-QA, a novel benchmark to evaluate whether LLMs can learn representations of soft robot designs that effectively bridge the gap between high-level task descriptions and low-level morphological and material choices. RoboCrafter-QA leverages the EvoGym simulator to generate a diverse set of soft robot design challenges, spanning robotic locomotion, manipulation, and balancing tasks. Our experiments with SOTA multi-modal LLMs reveal that while these models exhibit promising capabilities in learning design representations, they struggle with fine-grained distinctions between designs with subtle performance differences. To overcome these limitations, we finetune an efficient, open-source LLM that achieves SOTA performance on our benchmark, demonstrating superior capabilities in both design selection and direct generation of high-performing robot morphologies. Furthermore, we construct a physical replica of the modular soft robot and demonstrate a strong sim-to-real correlation, validating that superior benchmark performance has the potential to translate to effective real-world design selection. Our full system will be open-sourced to foster this exciting direction.