A robotic dog that can learn points to the future

First the dog is kicked over, then pushed over, then shoved with a stick. Each time it gets back to its feet.But don't rush to call the animal welfare authorities - it's a robotic dog undergoing training at Edinburgh University.

Alex Li is the Head of the Advanced Robotics Lab at the university and is among those leading the way in applying artificial intelligence (AI) to robotics. The AI that controls his dog can cope with situations it has never seen before, like slippery surfaces or stairs. And if you have ever watched internet footage of robots falling over, then you will appreciate how difficult that is to achieve....

.....Nathan Lepora is professor of robotics and AI at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. He has also been training an AI to move, but not a robotic dog, instead a robotic hand that has a sense of touch.

"The AI opens up much more general ways of learning how to control rather than, if you like, handcrafting simple controllers. That's the difference. And that's what the deep reinforcement learning opens up.

"And deep reinforcement learning also gives the capability to use much more complex sensory inputs as well, for that control."

However, it's not going to be easy to train an AI that can control a humanoid robot, equipped with all sorts of different sensors.

"The level of mechanical engineering [involved in] building these robots has kind of gone past our capability to control them, because they're so complicated. And that's the problem that's getting cracked at the moment," says Prof Lepora.