Watch mini humanoid robots showing off their football skills

Footballing robots have had an upgrade. Two-legged robots trained using deep reinforcement learning, which is driven by artificial intelligence, can walk, turn to kick a ball and get up after falling faster than robots working from scripted lessons. Guy Lever at Google DeepMind and his colleagues put battery-powered Robotis OP3 robots, which are about 50 centimetres tall and have 20 joints, through 240 hours of deep reinforcement learning. This technique combines two key tenets of AI training: reinforcement learning sees agents gaining skills through trial and error, with a target of being rewarded for choosing correctly more often than choosing wrongly, while deep learning uses layers of neural networks – attempts to mimic the human brain – to analyse patterns within the data the AI is shown. The researchers compared their bots against robots working from pre-scripted skills.