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Tencent announced the new progress of its robot dog Max, which can parkour, hurdle, and "infer other things from one instance"

2023-06-23

On June 14, Goose Factory announced the latest progress of its "Robot Dog Max". Can drill "dog holes", but also hurdles.

At present, most of the robot dogs on the market are still standing still. Tencent’s newly upgraded robot dog Max is really going to compete with real dogs for jobs.

The new progress of this research was brought by Tencent Robotics X robotics laboratory. The experiment was established in 2018, and the robot projects currently launched include the robot dog Max 1st and 2nd generation, robot dog Jamoca, wheeled robot Ollie, self-balancing self-driving motorcycle, etc.

In 2021, Tencent officially released the first fully self-developed software and hardware multi-modal quadruped robot robot dog Max. In 2022, the second-generation quadruped robot "Max" was released. significantly improved. Tencent said that by applying the cutting-edge pre-trained AI model and reinforcement learning technology to the field of robot control, the flexibility and autonomous decision-making ability of the robot dog Max have been greatly improved.

Mini Robot dog

The second-generation quadruped robot "Max"

By introducing the pre-training model and reinforcement learning technology, the robot dog can learn in stages, and effectively accumulate and store the skills and knowledge of different stages, so that the robot does not have to re-learn when solving new complex tasks, but repeats them. Use the learned attitude, environmental perception, and strategic planning knowledge at multiple levels to "infer other cases from one instance" and flexibly respond to complex environments.

Specifically, in the first pre-training study, Robotics X Lab cooperated with Tencent Games to use the motion capture data set in the game development process to let Max learn to walk, run, jump, stand and other actions.

The second pre-training learning uses additional network parameters to connect the smart posture of the robot dog mastered in the first stage with the external perception, so that the robot dog can respond to the external environment through the smart posture that has been learned, and complete crawling and hurdle running. , obstacle parkour shuttle and other difficult actions.

In the third stage of learning, the additional network will obtain information related to complex tasks, such as in the game, obtain opponent information and flag information, and finally enable the robot dog to autonomously form cognition on the strategy side.

To test these new skills that Max had mastered, the researchers designed a two-dog obstacle chase inspired by the obstacle chasing competition "World Chase Tag".

Based on the pre-trained model, the robot dog has not only learned the walking, running, jumping, standing and other actions of real dogs through deep reinforcement learning, but also has certain reasoning and decision-making capabilities. When the pursuer realizes that he can't catch up with the evader before he touches the flag, the pursuer will give up the pursuit, but will wander away from the evader, in order to wait for the next reset flag to appear.

In addition, when the chaser is about to catch the evader at the last moment, it will jump up and make a "pounce" action towards the evader. These are the active acceleration measures taken by the robot dog to ensure its own victory.

According to reports, all the control strategies of the robot dog in the game are neural network strategies, which are learned in the simulation and passed through zero-shot transfer (zero-shot transfer), allowing the neural network to simulate human reasoning methods to identify never-before-seen new things, and deploy this knowledge to real robot dogs.

Mini Robot dog

Tencent said that the entire process is trained in the virtual world, and no actual machine training or adjustment is required. The robot dog Max will continue to evolve and adapt in the future, and is expected to be put into emergency work such as search and rescue.

At present, many companies have entered the field of quadruped robots. Boston Dynamics is famous for its robot dog "Spot". On August 10 last year, Xiaomi's first bionic four-legged robot CyberDog was officially unveiled. Xiaopeng Motors' ecological enterprise Pengxing Intelligent also released the world's first rideable robot on September 7 last year. Smart robot horse. In addition, there are a number of local start-ups such as Yunshen and Yushu Technology.

The pre-trained AI model and deep reinforcement learning technology provide a set of general solutions for future robots to solve other complex tasks, laying a solid foundation for robots to enter real life and serve humans. Tencent Robot Dog is a vivid interpretation of AI-powered robots.

The biggest difference between robots created by AI and traditional robots is that AI robots show some intelligent characteristics similar to human beings, moving from the original "automation" to real "autonomous learning".

From a technical point of view, quadruped robots integrate the advanced level of bionic structure design of power system components, environmental perception technology, autonomous control technology, motion planning, motion control, SLAM and other technologies. With the improvement of robot performance and functions , machine vision can also be added to quadruped robots. It is foreseeable that with the continuous advancement of technologies such as computer vision, automatic control, artificial intelligence, gait planning and energy supply, the competitiveness of "robot dogs" will be further enhanced.

Robot dog;

Mini Robot dog;

Inspection Robot dog