This cheetah robot has taught itself to sprint and, well, it's pretty weird. Researchers got the machine to run nearly 13 feet per second. It ain't graceful, but this powerful technique is preparing robots for the chaos of the world: 🎥: MIT
, to hit its fastest speed ever—nearly 13 feet per second, or 9 miles per hour—not by meticulously hand-coding its movements line by line, but by encouraging digital versions of the machine to experiment with running in a simulated world. What the system landed on is … unconventional. But the researchers were able to port what the virtual robot learned into this physical machine that could then bolt across all kinds of terrain without falling on its, um, face.
This technique is known as reinforcement learning. Think of it like dangling a toy in front of a baby to encourage it to crawl, only here the researchers simulated 4,000 versions of the robot and encouraged them to first learn to walk, then to run in multiple directions. The digital Mini Cheetahs took trial runs on unique simulated surfaces that had been programmed to have certain levels of characteristics, like friction and softness.
The thousands of simulated robots could try all kinds of different ways of moving their limbs. Techniques that resulted in speediness were rewarded, while bad ones were tossed out. Over time, the virtual robots learned through trial and error, like a human does. But because this was happening digitally, the robots were able to learnfaster: Just three hours of practice time in the simulation equaled 100 hours in the real world.
To be clear, this isn’t necessarily the safest or most energy efficient way for the robot to run—the team was only optimizing for speed. But it’s a radical departure from how cautiously other robots have to move through the world. “Most of these robots are really slow,” says Pulkit Agrawal, an AI researcher at MIT who codeveloped the system. “They don't walk fast, or they can't run. And even when they're walking, they're just walking straight.
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