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The robot overlords are at it again—and this time, they’re learning how to walk faster than us. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Germany have created a robotic dog capable of learning how to bandy about on all fours in roughly an hour.
While this might seem like the prelude to a robot uprising, it was actually a part of an experiment to study how flesh-and-blood animals learn how to walk from stumbling. For example, when human babies learn how to walk, they typically stumble and fall on their first tries. Those “mistakes,” however, are actually crucial in the way we adjust our leg muscles and nervous system to eventually walk normally.
Utilizing a four-legged labrador-sized robot dubbed Morti, the MPI-IS team was able to successfully replicate this learning process—in incredible time too. They published a paper of their study on Monday in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.
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