Co-design of agents and environments

Rather than solely making the robots smarter, we also structure the physical spaces they operate in. By alternating between improving navigation policies and optimizing the environment layout, we have found — counterintuitively — that adding central obstacles or designing irregularly spaced shelving in warehouses forces robots to deconflict and coordinate their motion far more smoothly.

This extends to distributing intelligence into the infrastructure itself: by embedding visual sensors into the environment, a completely blind robot can see around corners, predict approaching traffic, and navigate to targets beyond its line of sight — without needing expensive on-board sensing.