Let’s say you wanted to build the world’s best stair-climbing robot. You’d need to optimize for both the brain and the body, perhaps by giving the bot some high-tech legs and feet, coupled with a powerful algorithm to enable the climb. Although design of the physical body and its brain, the “control,” are key ingredients to letting the robot move, existing benchmark environments favor only the latter. Co-optimizing for both elements is hard — it takes a lot of time to train various robot simulations to do different things, even…
