Earlier this week, we shared a video showing a humanoid robot recovering at lightning speed after being kicked to the ground. Its ability to get back up again was truly remarkable and demonstrates some of the great strides being made in robotics in recent times.
Now we have an even more extreme video (top) demonstrating how a robot can recover from something far worse than being knocked over: Having its legs sawed off.
The footage from Pittsburgh-based robotics startup Skild AI shows a robot dog using a specially designed AI brain to adapt to having its legs cut off at the knees. And it copes just fine.
“We built a robot brain that nothing can stop,” Skild AI, which has backing from the likes of Amazon and SoftBank, said in a post on X this week. “Shattered limbs? Jammed motors? If the bot can move, the brain will move it — even if it’s an entirely new robot body.”
Indeed, the video shows the dog using its AI brain to regain mobility in response to a range of disabilities, including a locked knee and faulty front legs (it simply gets up and walks on the other two!). And if you sling a heavy weight over it to make it lose balance, it soon adapts to that, too.
The remarkable robot dog — or more accurately, its AI-powered brain — can even handle having its legs extended by wooden poles, or having wheels attached. Short of a rocket-propelled grenade coming its way, nothing seems to be a problem for it.
Skild AI set about creating the AI brain as it was keen to create robots capable of adapting to potentially fast-changing real-world conditions.
To do this, it trained the AI to control not just one robot, but numerous ones all with different bodies.
“It cannot memorize the solution for one body, it must find a strategy that works across all of them,” Skild AI said in a blog post. “When faced with unpredictable scenarios, the AI can now use the strategies it learnt during training and keep going.”
It said it created “a universe with 100,000 different robots and trained our AI to control them all. After a millennia of simulated time, what emerged was a remarkably resilient, omni-bodied brain. We were often surprised with its ability to adapt to scenarios that were very different from what it saw at training time.”
The AI brain has no idea what robot it’s been placed inside when it’s switched on. So, as you can see from when the robot dog’s front legs are disabled, the AI treats it as a small humanoid robot and quickly learns to walk on two legs. It should be noted, however, that the brain currently needs a little time to adapt, though only “milliseconds to minutes, depending on the severity of the change.”
Skild AI’s adaptable robot brain could be incorporated into robots in a range of scenarios, including in unpredictable, dynamic environments like construction sites, warehouses, or disaster zones where conditions are constantly changing.
Its impressive work could also be used to accelerate innovation by providing a flexible AI platform compatible with many types of robots.
