Merging first changes to the GitHub repository

HISTORY.md

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+# Added first paper to the personal 
+
+## Details related to the paper added:
+1. ### Paper name:
+Modular Controllers Facilitate the Co-Optimization of Morphology and Control in Soft Robots 
+
+### Date added:
+March, 6th, 2025
+
+### Issues encountered while addding to personal fork
+Initially used the http link to clone the repo locally. Cloning was successful however, there was an issue while pushing.
+
+Next, I used ssh to clone the GitHub repository locally which worked for cloning and pushing the changes.

_data/paperlist.yml

@@ -1,5 +1,54 @@
 papers:
 
+- abstract: 'Soft robotics is a rapidly growing area of robotics research that would
+
+    benefit greatly from design automation, given the challenges of manually
+
+    engineering complex, compliant, and generally non-intuitive robot body plans
+
+    and behaviors. It has been suggested that a major hurdle currently limiting
+
+    soft robot brain-body co-optimization is the fragile specialization between a
+
+    robot''s controller and the particular body plan it controls, resulting in
+
+    premature convergence. Here we posit that modular controllers are more robust
+
+    to changes to a robot''s body plan. We demonstrate a decreased reduction in
+
+    locomotion performance after morphological mutations to soft robots with
+
+    modular controllers, relative to those with similar global controllers -
+
+    leading to fitter offspring. Moreover, we show that the increased
+
+    transferability of modular controllers to similar body plans enables more
+
+    effective brain-body co-optimization of soft robots, resulting in an increased
+
+    rate of positive morphological mutations and higher overall performance of
+
+    evolved robots. We hope that this work helps provide specific methods to
+
+    improve soft robot design automation in this particular setting, while also
+
+    providing evidence to support our understanding of the challenges of brain-body
+
+    co-optimization more generally.'
+  authors:
+  - Alican Mertan
+  - Nick Cheney
+  bibtex: " @inproceedings{Mertan_2023, series={GECCO \u201923}, title={Modular Controllers\
+    \ Facilitate the Co-Optimization of Morphology and Control in Soft Robots}, url={http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3583131.3590416},\
+    \ DOI={10.1145/3583131.3590416}, booktitle={Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary\
+    \ Computation Conference}, publisher={ACM}, author={Mertan, Alican and Cheney,\
+    \ Nick}, year={2023}, month=jul, pages={174\u2013183}, collection={GECCO \u2019\
+    23} }\n"
+  pdfurl: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.09358v1
+  title: "Modular Controllers Facilitate the Co\u2013Optimization of Morphology and\
+    \ Control in Soft Robots"
+  year: 2023
+
 - abstract: 'While significant research progress has been made in robot learning for
 
     control, unique challenges arise when simultaneously co-optimizing morphology.