This Cheetah Robot Taught Itself How to Sprint in a Weird Way

It takes years of practice to crawl and then walk well, during which time mothers don't have to worry about their children legging it out of the county. Roboticists don't have that kind of time to spare, however, so they're developing ways for machines to learn to move through trial and error--just like babies, only way, way faster. But MIT scientists announced last week that they got this research platform, a four-legged machine known as Mini Cheetah, to hit its fastest speed ever--nearly 13 feet per second, or 9 miles per hour--not by meticulously hand-coding its movements line by line, but by encouraging digital versions of the machine to experiment with running in a simulated world. What the system landed on is … unconventional. But the researchers were able to port what the virtual robot learned into this physical machine that could then bolt across all kinds of terrain without falling on its, um, face. This technique is known as reinforcement learning.