Generative AI taught a robot dog to scramble around a new environment

Researchers used the system, called LucidSim, to train a robot dog in parkour, getting it to scramble over a box and climb stairs even though it had never seen any real-world data. The approach demonstrates how helpful generative AI could be when it comes to teaching robots to do challenging tasks. It also raises the possibility that we could ultimately train them in entirely virtual worlds. The research was presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) last week. "We're in the middle of an industrial revolution for robotics," says Ge Yang, a postdoc at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who worked on the project. "This is our attempt at understanding the impact of these [generative AI] models outside of their original intended purposes, with the hope that it will lead us to the next generation of tools and models."