Researchers Create the First AI-Controlled Robotic Limb That Can Learn To Walk Without Being Programmed

schwit1 shares a report from ScienceAlert: Researchers at the University of Southern Carolina (USC) claim to have created the first AI-controlled robotic limb that can learn how to walk without being explicitly programmed to do so. The algorithm they used is inspired by real-life biology. Just like animals that can walk soon after birth, this robot can figure out how to use its animal-like tendons after only five minutes of unstructured play.

Today, most robots take months or years before they are ready to interact with the rest of the world. But with this new algorithm, the team has figured out how to make robots that can learn by simply doing. This is known in robotics as 'motor babbling' because it closely mimics how babies learn to speak through trial and error. 'During the babbling phase, the system will send random commands to motors and sense the joint angles,' co-author Ali Marjaninejad an engineer at USC, told PC Mag. 'Then, it will train the three-layer neural network to guess what commands will produce a given movement. We then start performing the task and reinforce good behavior.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.