Body: <p>This has been a mystery to me.</p>
  
  <p>All the walking robots look like idiots now. But we do have a lot of simulation-based results
  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgaEE27nsQw" rel="nofollow noreferrer">(Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures
  </a>), so why can't we just apply the simulation results to a real robot and let it walk, not like an idiot, but like an running ostrich?</p>
  
  <p>With the main loop running at more than 60 fps, I fail to see how possibly the program could fail to stop the robot from losing balance. When I balance a stick on my hand, I could probably only do 5 fps.</p>
  
  <p>We have not only supercomputers connected to the robots, but also reinforcement learning algorithms at our disposal, so what has been the bottleneck in the problem of bipedal walking?</p>
  
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2020-03-19T14:01:44.997Z
Comments.Text: Hi and welcome to AI SE! You say "All the walking robots look like idiots now." Can you please link us to a video/reference that shows that all walking robots walk like idiots, which is possible? Anyway, I assume you're talking about real-world robots, given that you show us a video of simulated robots walking more or less normally.
Comments.UserDisplayName: nbro
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2020-03-19T17:25:23.197Z
Comments.Text: See the Atlas by Boston Dynamics. He kinda looks like an idiot in some parts of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY :) I think the road from simulation-to-physical is not a trivial one. There are probably some hard challenges to tackle from a mechanical perspective. Otherwise, programming an agent to do bipedal walking in a simulated environment doesn't seem to challenging to me and is probably straightforward via genetic algorithms.
Comments.UserDisplayName: SpiderRico
Tags: <reinforcement-learning><robotics><cyborg>
Title: Why haven't we solved the problem of bipedal walking?
UserDisplayName: seilgu
ThreadText: # Why haven't we solved the problem of bipedal walking?
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2020-03-19)
  
  This has been a mystery to me.
  
  All the walking robots look like idiots now. But we do have a lot of simulation-based results
  [(Flexible Muscle-Based Locomotion for Bipedal Creatures](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgaEE27nsQw)), so why can't we just apply the simulation results to a real robot and let it walk, not like an idiot, but like an running ostrich?
  
  With the main loop running at more than 60 fps, I fail to see how possibly the program could fail to stop the robot from losing balance. When I balance a stick on my hand, I could probably only do 5 fps.
  
  We have not only supercomputers connected to the robots, but also reinforcement learning algorithms at our disposal, so what has been the bottleneck in the problem of bipedal walking?
  
  **Tags:** reinforcement-learning, robotics, cyborg
  
  > **Comments:**
  > **username_1**: Hi and welcome to AI SE! You say "All the walking robots look like idiots now." Can you please link us to a video/reference that shows that all walking robots walk like idiots, which is possible? Anyway, I assume you're talking about real-world robots, given that you show us a video of simulated robots walking more or less normally.  
  > **username_2**: See the Atlas by Boston Dynamics. He kinda looks like an idiot in some parts of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY :) I think the road from simulation-to-physical is not a trivial one. There are probably some hard challenges to tackle from a mechanical perspective. Otherwise, programming an agent to do bipedal walking in a simulated environment doesn't seem to challenging to me and is probably straightforward via genetic algorithms.  
  
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  ## 0 answers
  
  