Move over Spot—aka the Boston Dynamics robot dog doing things like guard Pompei—a new robot dog is in town to make us awwww in fear. Reuters reports the new dog on the block is developed by Swedish start up IntuiCell. The company claims its pup, called Luna, can learn just like a real boy, thanks to its functional digital nervous system.
Most of the robots entertaining us with handstands or traumatising us with fur suits, at the moment are trained by machine learning techniques. This usually requires a tonne of data, and relies on AI to compute through the variables and essentially work through algorithms to sort through uncountable variations and find what works. It often requires some pretraining—like Nvidia is doing for its GR00T N1—or at least a lot of parameter setting, and is a very computational way of doing things.
Luna is going about things a different way. The team at IntuiCell are trying to give their robot dog the ability to feel what works, as opposed to thinking it, for its development. This physical, agentic AI, means Luna should be able to figure out how to do things, instead of being specifically programmed for a task.
"What we have built is the first software that allows any machine to learn like humans and animals do," says IntuiCell CEO and co-founder Viktor Luthman. "There's no pre training, no offline simulations and no billion-dollar data centre in the background, but there's a nervous system that allows the machine to learn."
Right now Luna is just getting started and has just learned to stand; walking is the next big step. Rather than use a massive dataset to teach Luna, IntuiCell intends to hire a dog trainer to help teach Luna to walk. You can get a look at Luna doing its best in the video above. I wonder what kind of treats they're going to use to reward this metal mutt. Though, we may well end up seeing a robotic flesh-fido down the line.
Luna's attempts at standing are fairly compared to that of a baby animal, and visually it doesn't look far off. Though the big difference for Luna, other than the burden of life, is it's the first of its kind. There are no parents to help teach it, nor any deep embedded DNA understanding of the world. It's just Luna, and the sensitive nervous system IntuiCell has given it to help navigate the world.
So with future iterations, there's little doubt this tech will only get better. The goal here is to have robots that learn independently of large networks and instead can rely on themselves and the environment. This means that if Luna comes up against a brand new task, it should have a chance of figuring out a solution itself.
"The next step is exploring humanoid robotics, exploring autonomous robotics in unpredictable environments such as space exploration, deep sea exploration, or disaster response," Luthman said.
We could see a future where human-like robots can train themselves to navigate wild environments like the surface of Mars, and hopefully pave the way for humans in their discoveries. I just hope the researchers make sure to treat Luna right and give it lots of pets so that sensory system can learn to put off resenting its creators... for a little while, at least.
