"A four-legged robot that keeps crawling even after all four of its legs have been hacked off with a chainsaw is the stuff of nightmares for most people. For Deepak Pathak, cofounder and CEO of the startup Skild AI, the dystopian feat of adaptation is an encouraging sign of a new, more general kind of robotic intelligence. "This is something we call an omni-bodied brain," Pathak tells me."
"Skild's approach is to instead have a single algorithm learn to control a large number of different physical robots across a wide range of tasks. Over time, this produces a model which the company calls Skild Brain, with a more general ability to adapt to different physical forms-including ones it has never seen before. The researchers created a smaller version of the model, called LocoFormer, for an academic paper outlining its approach."
Skild AI trains one generalist algorithm on many different physical robots and tasks to create a transferable control model called Skild Brain. The model is designed to generalize across diverse robot morphologies and to adapt quickly to new situations such as missing limbs or unfamiliar terrain. A smaller academic variant named LocoFormer demonstrates the approach in research. The method aims to gather broader real-world data across platforms to overcome limitations of teleoperation and simulation-based training. The goal is a single brain capable of controlling many robots and solving varied locomotion challenges.
Read at WIRED
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