LogInThe bird-like creation can dance and traverse rough terrain.
Engineers often try to build robots to be as similar to humans as possible, including their appearance, but no human can be as cute as the recent creation from Disney Research.
During the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2023, Disney Research presented an adorable robot that reminds me of a dodo and Wall-E at the same time. It can chirp like a bird, capture onlookers' hearts on the dancefloor, and, most importantly, travel on rough, uneven terrain.
From the video above, you can notice that the robot is guided by a person with a controller. Although it's not clear how it works exactly, I'd say the device gives the little guy pre-programmed commands, allowing it to move, nod or shake its head, bend its legs, and make noise.
According to the people who attended the presentation, the project took only about a year, including the design and teaching the robot to walk.
And more is to come as Disney Research's latest paper called Transformer-based Neural Augmentation of Robot Simulation Representations suggests. There, the team proposes "to augment common simulation representations with a transformer-inspired architecture, by training a network to predict the true state of robot building blocks given their simulation state." This is meant to make robotic movements as close to life as possible.
"Because we augment building blocks, rather than the full simulation state, we make our approach modular which improves generalizability and robustness."
Perhaps we'll see an even sweeter robot from the company in the future – after all, this bird-like creature is not the first for Disney.
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