| Atlas In Action With Reinforcement Learning |
| Written by Harry Fairhead |
| Friday, 21 March 2025 |
|
A new video from Boston Dynamics and the Robotics and AI (RAI) Institute show the impact reinforcement learning has had on Atlas's fluidity of movement and demos what can be achieved by combining the latest AI with robotics As we recently reported Hydraulic Atlas Bows Out, Welcome Electric Atlas, Boston Dynamics has been moving to a new model of its humanoid robot, but hardware is just the start of it. Old-fashioned, if you can call it that, robotics is mainly about solving kinematic equations in one form or another and applying the results to actuators that move the limbs. It is mostly advanced engineering and AI may be used to help it but it isn't really AI-based. The huge success of reinforcement learning and neural networks in creating "intelligent agents" is thought to be a great breakthrough, but it is very likely that the application of the same techniques to robotics is where the real revolution will occur. In a collaboration between Boston Dynamics and the RAI Institute, Atlas has been trained using reinforcement learning with references from human motion capture and animation and you can see it in action in the video: We have already reported on the way in which the Spot quadruped robot has improved its speed and performance thanks to the application of a similar reinforcement learning regime provided by the RAI Institute. Now we can see the impact of AI on Atlas. Not only do we not have the bent knee walking so familiar in classical robots the movement seems fluid and human like. Most humanoid robots move by transitioning from one stable state to another but humans often move by passing though states that are unstable. We don't walk by keeping out center of gravity between out feet at all times - we walk by controlled falling. Of course, we learned all of this by not controlling the falling quite as well as we needed to and reinforcement learning does the rest. At this stage reinforcement learning can make robots move like us, but the next step is to make them behave like us and react to their surroundings. We are now closer to a general purpose humanoid robot than we ever have been.
More InformationRelated ArticlesHydraulic Atlas Bows Out, Welcome Electric Atlas Party With Atlas, Spot & Stretch Atlas Does Parkour And The Team Explains Why And How To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 
Comments
or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info |
| Last Updated ( Friday, 21 March 2025 ) |
