A pair of roboticists at the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Technical University of Munich, in Germany, has found that it is possible to give robots some degree of proprioception using machine-learning techniques. In their study reported in the journal Science Robotics, Fernando Díaz Ledezma and Sami Haddadin developed a new machine-learning approach to allow a robot to learn the specifics of its body.
Giving robots the ability to move around in the real world involves fitting them with technology such as cameras and pressure sensors —data from such devices is then processed and used to direct the legs and/or feet to carry out appropriate actions. This is vastly different from the way animals, including humans, get the job done.
With animals, the brain is aware of its body state—it knows where the hands and legs are, how they work and how they can be used to move around or interact with the environment. Such knowledge is known as proprioception. In this new effort, the researchers conferred similar abilities to robots using machine-learning techniques.
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