Lifelong Robot Recomposition via Persistent Categorical Modeling for Unified Task-Driven Co-Design, Verification, and Planning

Abstract:Robotic systems are traditionally designed and deployed in static configurations, with assumptions made at design-time becoming immutable constraints during runtime. This design-then-deploy paradigm produces performant systems under narrow operating conditions, but renders robots brittle when qualities of themselves, their tasks, or their environments unexpectedly change. We address this challenge with a compositional framework that formalizes robotic systems as abstract circuits within a strict symmetric monoidal category, in which design and runtime composition of hardware, software, and behavior are synthesized simultaneously via an SMT-based solver, with monoidal functors projecting the system into lifecycle-specific views and free symbolic variables simultaneously solving for parameters and entire component specifications within larger compositions. This persistent model also supports queries a long-lived system needs beyond plan existence across its entire lifecycle, including mapping Pareto fronts over candidate compositions, diagnosing why a composition has become infeasible, finding its minimal restoration, and reconfiguring with limited change to the deployed system. We evaluate against official implementations of optimal numeric, stream-based, and SMT-based planners all measured onboard a deployed robot and demonstrate the approach end-to-end in a search-and-rescue scenario in which the robot recognizes when it has become unfit and synthesizes and assumes new holistic configurations to restore operation. We release our solver and supporting software open-source.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2608.21676 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2608.21676v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.21676 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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