{"id":104942,"date":"2020-04-07T15:50:19","date_gmt":"2020-04-07T22:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/google-research-makes-for-an-effortless-robotic-dog-trot"},"modified":"2020-04-07T15:50:19","modified_gmt":"2020-04-07T22:50:19","slug":"google-research-makes-for-an-effortless-robotic-dog-trot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/google-research-makes-for-an-effortless-robotic-dog-trot","title":{"rendered":"Google research makes for an effortless robotic dog trot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/google-research-makes-for-an-effortless-robotic-dog-trot2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As capable as robots are, the original animals after which they tend to be designed are always much, much better. That\u2019s partly because it\u2019s difficult to learn how to walk like a dog directly <em>from<\/em> a dog \u2014 but <a href=\"https:\/\/ai.googleblog.com\/2020\/04\/exploring-nature-inspired-robot-agility.html\">this research from Google\u2019s AI labs<\/a> make it considerably easier.<\/p>\n<p>The goal of this research, a collaboration with UC Berkeley, was to find a way to efficiently and automatically transfer \u201cagile behaviors\u201d like a light-footed trot or spin from their source (a good dog) to a quadrupedal robot. This sort of thing has been done before, but as the researchers\u2019 blog post points out, the established training process can often \u201crequire a great deal of expert insight, and often involves a lengthy reward tuning process for each desired skill.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That doesn\u2019t scale well, naturally, but that manual tuning is necessary to make sure the animal\u2019s movements are approximated well by the robot. Even a very doglike robot isn\u2019t actually a dog, and the way a dog moves may not be exactly the way the robot should, leading the latter to fall down, lock up or otherwise fail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As capable as robots are, the original animals after which they tend to be designed are always much, much better. That\u2019s partly because it\u2019s difficult to learn how to walk like a dog directly from a dog \u2014 but this research from Google\u2019s AI labs make it considerably easier. The goal of this research, a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104942"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104942\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}