How MIT taught a quadruped to play soccer

A research team at MIT's Improbable Artificial Intelligence Lab, part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), taught a Unitree Go1 quadruped to dribble a soccer ball on various terrains. DribbleBot can maneuver soccer balls on landscapes like sand, gravel, mud and snow, adapt its varied impact on the ball's motion and get up and recover the ball after falling. The team used simulation to teach the robot how to actuate its legs during dribbling. This allowed the robot to achieve hard-to-script skills for responding to diverse terrains much quicker than training in the real world. Because the team had to load its robot and other assets into the simulation and set physical parameters, they could simulate 4,000 versions of the quadruped in parallel in real-time, collecting data 4,000 times faster than using just one robot.