Can AIGC Aid Intelligent Robot Design? A Tentative Research of Apple-Harvesting Robot

More recently, artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content (AIGC) is fundamentally transforming multiple sectors, including materials discovery, healthcare, education, scientific research, and industrial manufacturing. As for the complexities and challenges of intelligent robot design, AIGC has the potential to offer a new paradigm, assisting in conceptual and technical design, functional module design, and the training of the perception ability to accelerate prototyping. Taking the design of an apple-harvesting robot, for example, we demonstrate a basic framework of the AIGC-assisted robot design methodology, leveraging the generation capabilities of available multimodal large language models, as well as the human intervention to alleviate AI hallucination and hidden risks. Second, we study the enhancement effect on the robot perception system using the generated apple images based on the large vision-language models to expand the actual apple images dataset. Further, an apple-harvesting robot prototype based on an AIGC-aided design is demonstrated and a pick-up experiment in a simulated scene indicates that it achieves a harvesting success rate of 92.2% and good terrain traversability with a maximum climbing angle of 32°. According to the tentative research, although not an autonomous design agent, the AIGC-driven design workflow can alleviate the significant complexities and challenges of intelligent robot design, especially for beginners or young engineers.