Neural-Surrogate Co-Design of Aerodynamic Shape and Control

Control co-design jointly optimizes a robot's physical design and its controller. Existing techniques are limited in the number of model parameters and the complexity of the physical models they can handle. In this paper, we propose a gradient-based bilevel formulation that replaces the dynamics models of earlier techniques with a differentiable neural surrogate and differentiates through the trajectory optimizer using a structure-exploiting approach. We validate the framework on fixed-wing gliders, using NeuralFoil as the aerodynamic surrogate. The tasks are maximum-distance gliding, minimum-distance landing, and perching. Experiments on 2D airfoils and 3D wings show that our method runs about five times faster than a state-of-the-art evolutionary baseline. It also outperforms pipelines that optimize aerodynamic proxy metrics.