Reinforcement Learning Triples Spot’s Running Speed

About a year ago, Boston Dynamics released a research version of its Spot quadruped robot, which comes with a low-level application programming interface (API) that allows direct control of Spot’s joints. Even back then, the rumor was that this API unlocked some significant performance improvements on Spot, including a much faster running speed. That rumor came from the Robotics and AI (RAI) Institute, formerly The AI Institute, formerly the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, and if you were at