Watch this robot dog scramble over tricky terrain just by using its camera

Unlike existing robots on the market, such as Boston Dynamics' Spot, which moves around using internal maps, this robot uses cameras alone to guide its movements in the wild, says Ashish Kumar, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, who is one of the authors of a paper describing the work; it's due to be presented at the Conference on Robot Learning next month. Other attempts to use cues from cameras to guide robot movement have been limited to flat terrain, but they managed to get their robot to walk up stairs, climb on stones, and hop over gaps. The four-legged robot is first trained to move around different environments in a simulator, so it has a general idea of what walking in a park or up and down stairs is like. When it's deployed in the real world, visuals from a single camera in the front of the robot guide its movement. The robot learns to adjust its gait to navigate things like stairs and uneven ground using reinforcement learning, an AI technique that allows systems to improve through trial and error.