This ongoing project is fueled by my desire to control many mechanical extremities like an extension of my body (I’m assuming I’m not the only one who fantasizes about robots here).

They trained the model in a simulation environment using reinforcement learning until it had a broad understanding of how to articulate and move many parts of a robot body. They then implemented ...

Then, they had it learn from these movements but only using data it would have access to in the real world, such as measurements of inertia or speed from sensors on a real robot’s body.

But a start-up company called Grabit is using static electricity as a way to allow robots to manipulate the real world. In particular, Nike is using these robots to build shoes. You can see a demo ...