MIT scientists teach robotic dog to play football on uneven surfaces

Developers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created dog-like robot DribbleBot and trained him to play football. The robot dog is trained to navigate difficult terrain and can play ball on sand and grass, snow and mud.

According to the developers, most robots use wheels, which limits their use, for example, during natural disasters. At MIT, they want to create a robot that can move on any surface. As a training session, they trained DribbleBot to play football on uneven surfaces. Since the mid-1990s, robot competition tournaments have been held in the United States, but most of the machines there are bipedal, and the DribbleBot has four legs. The project is supported by both scientific and technical foundations and organizations, as well as the artificial intelligence laboratories of the US Air Force.

Evgeny Fedunenko