Boston Dynamics Wednesday announced a partnership designed to bring improved reinforcement learning to its electric Atlas humanoid robot. The tie-up is with the Robotics & AI Institute (RAI Institute), earlier often called The Boston Dynamics AI Institute.
Each organizations were founded by Marc Raibert, a former MIT professor who served as Boston Dynamics’ CEO for 30 years. The Institute, founded in 2022, allows Raibert to proceed the research that served as the inspiration for Boston Dynamics.
Each have ties to Hyundai. The Korean carmaker acquired Boston Dynamics back in 2021; Hyundai also funds the Institute, giving Raibert free rein to explore more experimental and bleeding-edge technologies than is feasible in a business company. The Institute mirrors Toyota’s creation of TRI, or Toyota Research Institute, which announced its own partnership with Boston Dynamics in October, focused on the usage of large behavior models. (LBMs).
The dual partnerships are designed to enhance the way in which Boston Dynamics’ electric Atlas humanoid learns recent tasks. The Robotics & AI Institute deal is specifically focused on reinforcement learning, a way that operates through trial and error, just like the way in which each humans and animals learn. Reinforcement learning has traditionally been extremely time-intensive, though the creation of effective simulation has allowed many processes to be carried out without delay in a virtual setting.
The Boston Dynamics/RAI Institute union kicked off earlier this month in Massachusetts. It’s the newest in a variety of collaborations between the pair, including a joint effort to develop a reinforcement learning research kit for the quadrupedal Spot robot by Boston Dynamics (which is its familiar robot “dog”). The brand new work focuses on each transferring simulation-based learning to real-world settings and improving how the corporate’s humanoid Atlas moves through and interacts with physical environments.
Pertaining to the latter, Boston Dynamics points to “dynamic running and full-body manipulation of heavy objects.” Each are examples of actions that require synchronization of the legs and arms. The humanoid’s bipedal form factor presents a variety of unique challenges — and opportunities — in comparison with Spot. Every activity can be subject to a broad range of forces, including balance, force, resistance, and motion.
Larger picture, Raibert notes in an announcement, “Our aim at RAI is to develop technology that permits future generations of intelligent machines. Working on Atlas with Boston Dynamics enables us to make advances in reinforcement learning on arguably probably the most sophisticated humanoid robot available. This work will play a vital role in advancing the capabilities of humanoids not only by expanding its skillset, but in addition streamlining the method to realize recent skills.”
News of the partnership arrives a day after Figure AI founder and CEO Brett Adcock announced that the Bay Area company is abandoning a partnership with OpenAI in favor of developing its own in-house models.
“We found that to resolve embodied AI at scale in the true world, you might have to vertically integrate robot AI,” the manager told TechCrunch. “We will’t outsource AI for a similar reason we will’t outsource our hardware.”
Figure determined that the perfect AI models for its humanoid are those which can be developed specifically for its robots, in-house. OpenAI’s approach to embodied intelligence — meaning AI in a physical form — has understandably been less focused given the ChatGPT maker’s size and scope. That news also arrived on the heels of rumors that OpenAI has been exploring the creation of its own humanoid robots.
Most corporations involved in humanoid space are working on their very own bespoke AI models. That actually applies to Boston Dynamics, which has many years of experience developing software to run by itself unique robotics systems. While the RAI Institute is technically a separate organization, each share a parent company, founder, and, presumably, common goals.
