Google robot taught itself to walk entirely on its own

Recommendable! Quite impressive! New advances in robotic locomotion!

This time the robot was trained largely in a real environment using self supervised learning!

"Through these various tweaks, the robot learned how to walk autonomously across several different surfaces, including flat ground, a memory foam mattress, and a doormat with crevices. The work shows the potential for future applications that may require robots to navigate through rough and unknown terrain without the presence of a human. ... Within a few hours, relying purely on tweaks to current state-of-the-art algorithms, they successfully got a four-legged robot to learn to walk forward and backward, and turn left and right, completely on its own."

This robot taught itself to walk entirely on its own - MIT Technology Review: Google is teaching robots to navigate without human intervention—a prerequisite to being useful in the real world.

These are the two underlying ArXiv papers:

1. Beyond Dropout: Feature Map Distortion to Regularize Deep Neural Networks Yehui Tang, Yunhe Wang, Yixing Xu, Boxin Shi, Chao Xu, Chunjing Xu, Chang Xu https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.11022
2. Learning to Walk via Deep Reinforcement Learning Tuomas Haarnoja, Sehoon Ha, Aurick Zhou, Jie Tan, George Tucker, Sergey Levine https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.11103