{"id":116709,"date":"2020-12-05T12:22:25","date_gmt":"2020-12-05T20:22:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/realant-a-low-cost-quadruped-robot-that-can-learn-via-reinforcement-learning"},"modified":"2020-12-05T12:22:25","modified_gmt":"2020-12-05T20:22:25","slug":"realant-a-low-cost-quadruped-robot-that-can-learn-via-reinforcement-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/12\/realant-a-low-cost-quadruped-robot-that-can-learn-via-reinforcement-learning","title":{"rendered":"RealAnt: A low-cost quadruped robot that can learn via reinforcement learning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/pG-XhH-9s7o?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Over the past decade or so, roboticists and computer scientists have tried to use reinforcement learning (RL) approaches to train robots to efficiently navigate their environment and complete a variety of basic tasks. Building affordable robots that can support and manage the exploratory controls associated with RL algorithms, however, has so far proved to be fairly challenging.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers at Aalto University and Ote Robotics have recently created RealAnt, a low-cost, four-legged robot that can effectively be used to test and implement RL algorithms. The new robotics platform, presented in <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2011.03085\">a paper pre-published on arXiv<\/a>, is a minimalistic and affordable real-world version of the \u2018Ant\u2019 robot simulation environment, which is often used in RL research.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe initial inspirations for our work were RL studies that successfully demonstrated learning to walk from scratch on ant-like quadruped and humanoid robot simulations,\u201d Jussi Sainio, co-founder of Ote Robotics, told Tech Xplore. \u201cThe underlying premise with RL algorithms is that programming a robot to do tasks becomes much easier and more \u2018natural\u2019\u2014one just needs to define the available sensor measurements, motor actions, then set a target goal and plug them all into a <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/reinforcement+learning\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">reinforcement learning<\/a> algorithm, which figures out the rest.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over the past decade or so, roboticists and computer scientists have tried to use reinforcement learning (RL) approaches to train robots to efficiently navigate their environment and complete a variety of basic tasks. Building affordable robots that can support and manage the exploratory controls associated with RL algorithms, however, has so far proved to be [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-information-science","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116709","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\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116709\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}