Solved with its feet: ETH legged robot cracks a giant Rubik's Cube
Researchers at ETH Zurich have taught the four-legged robot ANYmal to solve an oversized Rubik's Cube using only its legs – without remote control, in roughly eight to nine minutes.
Photo: Lars Karlsson (Keqs) / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped and resized)
Video: YouTube · Robotic Systems Lab: Legged Robotics at ETH Zürich · youtube.com
A team at ETH Zurich's Robotic Systems Lab has had a four-legged walking robot solve a giant Rubik's Cube – using only its feet. The ANYmal-D robot detects the cube with a camera, plans the solution and then flips and turns the cube's layers itself. According to the researchers, it achieved three fully autonomous solves on real hardware, each with about 30 steps and taking around eight to nine minutes.
The robot learned its moves – flipping forwards and backwards and rotating a layer – through reinforcement learning in simulation; a "teacher" model trained with extra information passed its skills on to a camera-based "student" model. In tests the system identified the colours of the cube's squares correctly 100 percent of the time indoors and 98.7 percent outdoors, and located the cube to within about two centimetres.
The authors include ETH professor Marco Hutter and Cesar Cadena, and one co-author also works for Nvidia. The work has been published as a paper on arXiv; the magazine IEEE Spectrum featured the video in its robotics column on Friday.