MOCHA: Multi-Objective Co-Design using Hypernetwork Architectures

Abstract

In this work, we present MOCHA, the first, to our knowledge, reinforcement learning based approach to computing a family of Pareto-optimal policies across the design space of a robot using a single network. Specifically, MOCHA leverages the hypernetwork architecture to learn a network that produces specialized network parameters optimized for a given objective and parameterized robot design; we term this a multi-objective design hypernetwork (MDH). We demonstrate the capabilities of MDHs to represent a complex family of design-dependent strategies on two distinct robot morphologies, each with six design dimensions and across 2-3 objectives. Moreover, we propose an approach for efficiently producing a Design Pareto set using evolutionary search of the learned policy network, generating the optimal design-policy combination for each objective prioritization. Lastly, we provide an efficient method for computing generalist robot designs which achieve the best cumulative performance across the entire set of objectives.