Robot with Broken Leg Learns to Walk Again in 2 Minutes

July 30th, 2014

Via: Medium:

When animals lose a limb, they learn to hobble remarkably quickly. And yet when robots damage a leg, they become completely incapacitated. That’s not so much of a problem for robots that are confined to factories where help is always on hand.

But robots have been evolving rapidly and are now on the verge of being able to cope with much more varied environments. In the next few years, we should see robots capable of domestic chores in the home, providing assistance to the elderly and of working side-by-side with humans in factories and offices.

It’s inevitable that these robots will become damaged. So how will they cope?

Today, Antoine Cully at the Sorbonne University in Paris and a couple of pals say they’ve developed a technique that allows a damaged robot to learn how to walk again in just a few seconds. They say their work has important consequences for the reliability and robustness of future robots and may also provide some insight into the way that animals adapt to injury as well.

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