Kicking Over This Robot Dog Won't Stop It Chasing You

They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but now you can have a robot dog that learns its own tricks, which should both impress and scare you in equal measure.

As Engadget reports, a team of researchers at the Robotic Systems Lab in Switzerland have created a four-legged robot called ANYmal that knows how to recover from a fall. The researchers didn't tell it how to do that, ANYmal learned using computer simulation.

Through the use of a neural network and hours of computer simulation, the robot dog ended up reacting 25 times faster to what had happened. In this case, the researchers kicked the robot over so as to force a recovery. Another benefit to relying on simulation to learn is adaptability. If the robot was told how to recover that would only work for a small set of situations, but by learning itself it doesn't matter how the terrain changes, ANYmal figures it out.

As the video above explains, simulation alone isn't good enough as it doesn't allow for the complex dynamics of a moving robot. That's where the neural network comes in, which adds the dynamic component and allows for learning from the simulation. Then it's just a case of letting the system run for thousands upon thousands of iterations, logging the data, and improving responses until the desired behavior is demonstrated.

It's not just fall recovery that's improved, ANYmal was able to walk more efficiently after training and run faster. It also doesn't matter what the fall position is, the robot recovers every time. If that doesn't scare you enough, consider the training takes no longer than 11 hours to complete and can be applied to any robot.

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If Robotic Systems Lab teams up with the talent from Boston Dynamics, it won't be long before ANYmal can open a door, flawlessly navigate an office, and maybe even perform some dog parkour one day.