Having seen so much progress in AI this year, I'm surprised to see boston dynamics still using relatively old-school methods.
I'd expect their robots to be left in a room 24x7 with various 'toys' to pick up, manipulate, move around, climb on, etc. Then hook up the actuators and sensors to a big datacenter scale training thing and get it to learn all the dynamics and stuff with some kind of reinforcement learning.
The fact they're still debugging exact foot placement, balance and how to grip items seems so very 2010's. The AI should have figured that out from tens of thousands of hours of training data by now.
I suspect the reason they can't use these AI based methods are that their robot is too expensive to make many of... Their robot is too fragile and would break itself too quickly left to try out random things.
I think they need to work on a more robust robot, with sensors to detect when anything is 'nearly damaged' (ie. like pain sensors - perhaps in the form of an air-filled inflatable coat, where any pressure increase means the body is touching on something, which can be fed back to the AI as 'pain').
I'd expect their robots to be left in a room 24x7 with various 'toys' to pick up, manipulate, move around, climb on, etc. Then hook up the actuators and sensors to a big datacenter scale training thing and get it to learn all the dynamics and stuff with some kind of reinforcement learning.
The fact they're still debugging exact foot placement, balance and how to grip items seems so very 2010's. The AI should have figured that out from tens of thousands of hours of training data by now.
I suspect the reason they can't use these AI based methods are that their robot is too expensive to make many of... Their robot is too fragile and would break itself too quickly left to try out random things.
I think they need to work on a more robust robot, with sensors to detect when anything is 'nearly damaged' (ie. like pain sensors - perhaps in the form of an air-filled inflatable coat, where any pressure increase means the body is touching on something, which can be fed back to the AI as 'pain').