Autonomous robots have come a long way since the fastidious Roomba. In recent years, artificially intelligent systems have been deployed in self-driving cars, last-mile food delivery, restaurant service, patient screening, hospital cleaning, meal prep, building security, and warehouse packing. Each of these robotic systems is a product of an ad hoc design process specific to that particular system. In designing an autonomous robot, engineers must run countless trial-and-error simulations, often informed by intuition. These simulations are tailored to a particular robot’s components and tasks, in order to tune and optimize…
