Teaching a robot how to walk and jump is one thing, but how about a bot with a knack for dragging its backside across the floor or sliding forward on its nose.
These rather unusual behaviors emerged during Google’s testing of a new technique to allow simulated robots to independently learn useful skills, such as walking and jumping, which can be applied to a wide variety of tasks.
“Conveniently, because skills are learned without a priori knowledge of the task, the learned skills can be used for many different tasks,” the researchers note in the paper.