Benefits of Low-Cost Bio-Inspiration in the Age of Overparametrization

Abstract

While Central Pattern Generators (CPGs) and Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP) are widely used paradigms in robot control, few systematic studies have been performed on the relative merits of large parameter spaces in highly constrained settings. As opposed to traditional Machine Learning contexts, our input and output spaces are small and performance is bounded thus having more parameters may actively hinder the learning process instead of empowering it. To empirically measure this, we submit a given robot morphology, with limited proprioceptive capabilities, to controller optimisation under two bio-inspired paradigms (CPGs and MLPs) with evolutionary- and reinforcement- trainer protocols. By varying parameter spaces across multiple reward functions, we demonstrate that shallow MLPs and densely connected CPGs result in better performance when compared to deeper MLPs or Actor-Critic architectures. To account for the relationship between said performance and the number of parameters, we introduce a Parameter Impact metric which showcases diminishing returns for MLPs but not for CPGs. Taken together these results demonstrate, on a fixed quadrupedal morphology, the benefits of integrating prior bias when considering locomotion tasks with simple hinge actuators.