Sony’s aibo canine might quickly stroll quietly and carry out elaborate dance routines

March 4, 2025 characteristic

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Sony's aibo canine might quickly stroll quietly and carry out elaborate dance routines

Aibo, the cute-looking robotic pet developed by Sony, was designed to be a family companion. The robotic can already emulate most of the actions and behaviors of actual canines, reminiscent of strolling on 4 legs, responding when it’s known as by its identify, reacting to toys, performing methods and responding to cuddles.

Researchers at ETH Zurich and Sony Group Company just lately developed new reinforcement studying (RL)-based fashions that would additional increase the aibo robotic's capabilities. These fashions, outlined in two totally different papers pre-published on arXiv, are particularly meant to permit the robotic to stroll quietly and carry out expressive dance routines, respectively.

"Customers of aibo, the robotic developed by Sony, have highlighted the noise of the robotic's footsteps as it’s strolling round their house," Ryo Watanabe, first creator of the research, informed Tech Xplore.

"We thus just lately designed a sim-to-real primarily based RL strategy to attenuate the foot contact velocity within the physics simulator to attain quiet strolling."

To scale back the noise that the aibo pet makes whereas strolling, Watanabe and his colleagues developed a brand new strategy primarily based on RL. Their methodology was educated to actively dampen and stiffen every of the robotic's joints, leveraging knowledge collected by the sensors beneath its paws and progressively imposing penalties on fast actions that produce noise.

The researchers utilized their strategy to aibo and assessed its efficiency in real-world experiments. They then additionally in contrast the noise that the robotic made when using their methodology to the noise it made when its locomotion was guided by different baseline RL-based strategies and the controllers at present utilized by Sony.

"We discovered that our locomotion controller considerably decreases the noise produced by the robotic whereas strolling, making it considerably quieter than business controllers from Sony and different typical RL controllers," mentioned Watanabe.

Along with equipping aibo with the flexibility to stroll extra quietly round house environments, the researchers got down to improve its leisure expertise. Particularly, they created a mannequin known as Deep Fourier Mimic (DFM), which mixes movement illustration with RL to provide extra expressive dance routines.

"Creating various inventive motions for leisure robots is time-consuming for designers and usually restricted to easy movement playback," defined Watanabe. "In distinction, DFM permits leisure robots to mimic a creative movement as a lot as attainable whereas including an extra process, reminiscent of locomotion."

Watanabe and his colleagues confirmed that the brand new dancing coverage they created resulted in smoother and extra pure actions. Furthermore, it allowed the aibo robotic to work together with customers in new methods, dancing with them and mimicking their actions.

"The dancing coverage we developed not solely tracks reference motions but additionally transitions between totally different movement modes naturally," mentioned Watanabe.

The brand new RF-based approaches designed by this group of researchers could be utilized to aibo, making it quieter and additional enhancing its means to entertain customers. As well as, they might be utilized to different family robots or to robotic techniques designed to entertain visitors at theme parks worldwide.

Sooner or later, Watanabe and his colleagues hope to beat a number of the limitations they noticed when testing the fashions in real-world experiments.

"We noticed a trade-off between quietness and robustness throughout strolling," added Watanabe.

"We thus now purpose to develop a technique for studying a strolling coverage that’s each quiet and strong by leveraging notion data. The expressive dance methodology, then again, exhibited a bonus for periodic motions reminiscent of dance and locomotion, however not for non-periodic motions like greedy, kicking, and standing up, which at present must be segmented individually."

Extra data: Ryo Watanabe et al, Studying Quiet Strolling for a Small House Robotic, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2502.10983

Ryo Watanabe et al, DFM: Deep Fourier Mimic for Expressive Dance Movement Studying, arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2502.10980

Journal data: arXiv

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Quotation: Sony's aibo canine might quickly stroll quietly and carry out elaborate dance routines (2025, March 4) retrieved 4 March 2025 from https://techxplore.com/information/2025-03-sony-aibo-dog-quietly-elaborate.html This doc is topic to copyright. Aside from any truthful dealing for the aim of personal examine or analysis, no half could also be reproduced with out the written permission. The content material is offered for data functions solely.

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