Robo-dog learns to walk quicker than a newborn animal
A ROBOT dog has taught itself to walk in just one hour in a similar way to how newborn animals learn to stand on their own feet after birth.
Morti, the mechanical canine, was programmed with an algorithm that resembles the central nervous system and acts reflexively, correcting walking mistakes in real time rather than following complicated programming.
The robot learnt to walk by continuously evaluating feedback from sensors telling it whether its feet were striking the ground correctly, and monitoring its balance and movement smoothness.
When it was placed on a treadmill, Morti initially bumped along, slipping and sliding until eventually learning how to stay upright. After an hour, it was steadily walking on it.
The design could be useful for creating energy efficient robots that do not need to waste power on complex processing.
The research was published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.