From Biological Curves to Soft Modular Robots: Learning-Based Inverse Design with Uncertainty-Guided Refinement
Dixiang Wang, Minghao Zha, Arifur Rahman, Yinhong Qin, Yitao Jiang, Shiyang Lu, Zebing Mao, Muhao Chen, Luyang Zhao · 2026 arXiv · PDF
Abstract
Animals exhibit diverse shape-changing behaviors, from the undulatory swimming of eels to the arching movements of inchworms. Reproducing these biological shapes with modular soft robots offers a promising approach to developing versatile bioinspired robotic systems. However, translating a desired shape into a feasible robotic configuration remains challenging. Existing cable-driven modular soft robots rely on computationally expensive physics-based modeling and combinatorial search for inverse design, making it difficult to efficiently reproduce diverse target shapes. To address this challenge, we present a learning-based real-to-sim-to-real framework that translates biological curves into robotic configurations through surrogate-assisted inverse design and uncertainty-guided refinement. The proposed method combines learned inverse prediction with targeted candidate exploration, using a fast forward surrogate to evaluate and select suitable designs. The learned forward surrogate reduces deformation prediction time from \(1.53 \times 10^5\) ms to 0.0008 ms, achieving approximately a \(1.9 \times 10^8\)-fold speedup. At the same time, the proposed inverse design method reduces design time from \(1.99 \times 10^6\) ms to 4.18 ms. On 5,000 test samples generated from previously unseen threading patterns, the method achieves a 93% shape reconstruction success rate under surrogate-based evaluation. Physical demonstrations with four bioinspired robots further illustrate the translation of biological curves into realizable robotic shapes.
TL;DR
Animals exhibit diverse shape-changing behaviors, from the undulatory swimming of eels to the arching movements of inchworms. Reproducing these biological shapes with modular soft robots offers a promising approach to developing versatile bioinspired robotic systems.