Robot dogs can learn to walk in an hour: Mimicking animal instincts, research has been published in a Nature sub-publication

According to foreign media Tech Xplore reported that the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Stuttgart, Germany, invented a small robot dog Morti with four legs, which can adjust its walking posture after each fall and learn how to walk on its own.

The paper illustrating the technique, "Learning Plastic Matching of Robot Dynamics in Closed-loop Central Pattern Generators," was published July 18 in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. The first author of the paper is Felix Ruppert.

Ruppert said, "Our robot dog Morti has the same reflexes as an animal and can learn how to walk from failure on its own."

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The study has been published in the Nature journal. This network of neurons does not require input from the brain to produce periodic muscle contractions.

Rupert installed a virtual spinal cord on Morti's back to simulate the action of the CPG, and installed a sample database in this virtual spinal cord. as Morti walks smoothly, sensor data from the robot's feet are constantly compared to data from the CPG sample database to provide an appropriate walking posture.

If the robot falls, the learning algorithm optimizes the walking style by changing the distance and speed of the legs swinging back and forth. During the machine learning process, CPG sends some adaptive motion signals to make the robot walk more smoothly. The core of this machine learning process is to change the output signals of the CPG and to monitor under what conditions the machine will stumble.

Morti mimics the process by which small animals learn to walk, and they all fall over and over before finding the most effective use of their muscles and learning to walk. At first, Morti will fall down, but after about an hour, the algorithm will help Morti find the best way to walk, Rupert said. Ruppert adds, "My team is currently adding more sensors to Morti and expanding Mortimer's range of motion. We want to make Morti more like an animal."

Second, energy efficient, Morti walk an hour after the energy consumption of 42% reduction

While most industrial quadruped robots require hundreds of watts of power to travel the same distance, Morti consumes only 5 watts of power.

This is partly because industrial quadrupeds are larger and heavier, requiring more power to support their actions, and partly because Morti's algorithms are smarter.