A clip from the simulation where virtual robots learn to climb steps.
An army of more than 4, 000 marching doglike robots is a vaguely menacing sight, even in a simulation. But it may point the way for machines to learn new tricks.
The virtual robot army was developed by researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland and chipmaker Nvidia . They used the wandering bots in order to train an algorithm that was then used to control the legs of a real-world robot.
In the simulation, the machines—called ANYmals —confront challenges like slopes, steps, and steep drops in a virtual landscape. Each time a robot learned to navigate a challenge, the researchers presented a harder one, nudging the particular control algorithm to be more sophisticated.
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