This Robot Can Play Basketball

Anyone who has programmed robots in the past knows how challenging it can be to teach them how to play basketball and other sports. This Basketball Playing Robot has already learned how to throw a ball into the hoop. As the folks at Interactive Robotics Lab @ ASU explain, this robot learned new skills using the Sparse Latent Space Policy Search algorithm.

The robot repeatedly threw the ball and received a reward based on the distance of the ball to the center of the hoop. It learned these new skills in a couple of hours.

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