Robot dog taught itself to get back up when people kick it over

It gets knocked down, but it gets up again. This dog-like robot learns to explore all the ways to stand up after falling over – or being shoved, as they often are during testing – one of the toughest tests for four-legged robots to pass. ANYmal is about the size of a large dog, standing 70 centimetres high and weighing 35 kilograms. Its has 12 moving parts that must be coordinated to walk, run or right the robot after it falls over. Modelling all those points and the positions they could potentially take in various landscapes and at different speeds would take weeks for a human to input, says Jemin Hwangbo at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, who led the study.