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arXiv · 2510.22336

Toward Humanoid Brain-Body Co-design: Joint Optimization of Control and Morphology for Fall Recovery

Bo Yue·Sheng Xu·Kui Jia·Guiliang Liu
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Abstract

Humanoid robots represent a central frontier in embodied intelligence, as their anthropomorphic form enables natural deployment in humans' workspace. Brain-body co-design for humanoids presents a promising approach to realizing this potential by jointly optimizing control policies and physical morphology. Within this context, fall recovery emerges as a critical capability. It not only enhances safety and resilience but also integrates naturally with locomotion systems, thereby advancing the autonomy of humanoids. In this paper, we propose RoboCraft, a scalable humanoid co-design framework for fall recovery that iteratively improves performance through the coupled updates of control policy and morphology. A shared policy pretrained across multiple designs is progressively finetuned on high-performing morphologies, enabling efficient adaptation without retraining from scratch. Concurrently, morphology search is guided by human-inspired priors and optimization algorithms, supported by a priority buffer that balances reevaluation of promising candidates with the exploration of novel designs. Experiments show that RoboCraft achieves an average performance gain of 44.55% on seven public humanoid robots, with morphology optimization drives at least 40% of improvements in co-designing four humanoid robots, underscoring the critical role of humanoid co-design.

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Bo Yue, Sheng Xu, Kui Jia, Guiliang Liu. 2025-10-25. Toward Humanoid Brain-Body Co-design: Joint Optimization of Control and Morphology for Fall Recovery. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22336

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