"Morti" can neither bark nor fetch a stick, as you would expect from a dog.
But the headless robot dog doesn't have to.
Because Morti is a movement miracle the size of a Labrador.
It only took the machine an hour to be able to run stably on its own.
A skill that most flesh-and-blood four-legged friends who have just seen the light of day would probably envy him for.
Mortis Herrchen, researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, wanted to use their walking robot to see how newborn baby animals learn fluid movement sequences.
Morti also stumbled, struggled for balance, fell over and got up again - all this until he could walk stably.
Thanks to a learning algorithm, this was done quickly, as Felix Ruppert’s team writes in “Nature Machine Intelligence”.
Robotic arm with body awareness
It is unlikely that Morti will one day be able to run as fast and, above all, frolic around like a young dog.
Because it lacks something crucial that all mechanical beings have lacked so far, no matter how intelligent they may be: Robots usually have no clue about their own bodies.
But here, too, progress has recently been made.
Researchers from Columbia University in New York have breathed self-awareness into a robotic arm.
The arm knows how it is constructed, how it has to move in space and navigate around an obstacle in order to reach its destination without colliding.
The researchers write in the journal Science Robotics that it can even diagnose itself, for example if one of the electric motors is defective.
A self-perception would even make sensitive creatures out of all industrial robots that rigidly execute the commands of a computer program.
Also, robot dogs, unlike the snappy four-legged friends, do not have to be kept on a short leash.