From Digital to Physical Reservoir Computing: Co-Optimizing Soft Robotic Reservoirs via Dynamics Matching

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00484v1
• Date: Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:21:23 GMT
• Title: From Digital to Physical Reservoir Computing: Co-Optimizing Soft Robotic Reservoirs via Dynamics Matching
• Abstract summary: Soft robotic substrates are promising for Physical Reservoir Computing.<n>Physical reservoirs are often adopted as-is rather than pretrained or co-optimized.<n>We investigate whether a physical reservoir can instead be pretrained against high-performing digital reference dynamics.
• Score: 45.97903450942484
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Soft robotic substrates are promising for Physical Reservoir Computing (PRC) because their compliant nonlinear dynamics can provide temporal memory, high-dimensional state transformations, and efficient inference. However, physical reservoirs are often adopted as-is rather than pretrained or co-optimized, potentially limiting soft robotic PRC performance relative to digital reservoirs. We investigate whether a physical reservoir can instead be pretrained against high-performing digital reference dynamics. Our formulation jointly optimizes physical parameters, a diffeomorphic physical-reference state map, and feedforward-feedback control using a differentiable physical model and an acceleration-level equation-error objective that avoids temporal integration. As a proof of concept, we instantiate the formulation with simulated soft robots, a Random Oscillators Network (RON) reference, and parallel multi-start gradient descent. We evaluate the optimized reservoirs on classification (sMNIST and ADIAC) and forecasting (Mackey-Glass and Lorenz96) tasks across four reservoir dimensions. Compared with unoptimized soft robot reservoirs, the optimized reservoirs achieve a mean relative improvement of 33.7% across all tasks and datasets, while remaining close to the digital reference. These results demonstrate the feasibility of dynamics-level co-optimization for the simulated soft robotic reservoirs considered here.

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