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by spunker540 459 days ago
Pretty cool! At first I wasn’t that impressed because it’s mostly just pushing to get some speed then “passively” riding down some ramps and steps. Then I realized that riding down steps is not a passive activity — most humans will fail their first time and need to learn to maintain balance while the board bounces over rough terrain.

I think most inanimate objects would fall off a skateboard when pushed down steps, so it’s an impressive display of balance and tool-use in my opinion!

2 comments

Maybe it's this part of the abstract?

>Our approach incorporates a beta policy distribution and a multi-critic architecture to model contact-guided motions, exemplified by a challenging quadrupedal robot skateboard task

I'm not an expert on this but maybe someone here can explain it a bit about a beta policy distribution and a multi-critic architecture and how come that is good to model contact-guided motions?

> most humans will fail their first time

it's easier on 4 legs

And lower center of gravity
And multiple takes