This research area focuses on automating and optimizing robot design, an inherently challenging task often involving cross-domain dependencies and complex trade-offs among performance, cost, efficiency, and robustness.  Our approach formulates robot design as a constrained optimization problem. In combination with other techniques, we use constraint programming to efficiently navigate extensive solution spaces of over 10²⁵ candidate solutions and identify globally optimal Pareto fronts within seconds. Our methodology has been effectively demonstrated in complex applications such as optimally co-designing the component selection and task scheduling of a quadcopter fleet performing package delivery. Through this project, we aim to enable rapid design iteration, streamline decision-making, and achieve reliable, high-performance robotic solutions.

Publications

AJ Wilhelm and N Napp Monotone Subsystem Decomposition for Efficient Multi-Objective Robot Design International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025.

AJ Wilhelm, N Napp Constraint Programming for Component-Level Robot Design International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2023