Our Popular Computer Science section takes a look at how engineers from the University of Leeds and University College London have developed a robot that can tackle terrain like an animal.
A four-legged robot has learned to adjust its gait instinctively to handle rough, unfamiliar ground, a breakthrough researchers say could help robots work safely in hazardous environments.
Engineers from the University of Leeds and University College London developed the AI system by copying how animals change the way they move. Published in Nature Machine Intelligence, the study shows the robot — nicknamed ‘Clarence’ — navigating timber, loose wood chips and overgrown vegetation without extra programming.
‘Our findings could have a significant impact on the future of legged robot motion control by reducing many of the previous limitations around adaptability’, said Joseph Humphreys, study lead and postgraduate researcher at Leeds. ‘This deep reinforcement learning framework teaches gait strategies and behaviour inspired by real animals — or ‘bio-inspired’ — such as saving energy, adjusting movements as needed and gait memory, to achieve highly adaptable and optimal movement, even in environments never previously encountered.’
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‘All of the training happens in simulation’, he added. ‘You train the policy on a computer, then take it and put it on the robot and it is just as proficient as in the training. It’s similar to The Matrix, when Neo’s skill in martial arts is downloaded into his brain, but he doesn’t undergo any physical training in the real world.’
Professor Zhou, senior author from UCL Computer Science, said: ‘Instead of training robots for specific tasks, we wanted to give them the strategic intelligence animals use to adapt their gaits — using principles like balance, coordination and energy efficiency.’
The team tested Clarence by directing it over real-world obstacles and knocking its legs to see if it could stay upright. They say the approach could lead to legged robots able to work in disaster response , planetary exploration and places too dangerous for humans.
Read more about the study on the University of Leeds’ website.
