Robots like Atlas, Spot, and Stretch have amazed people with natural, life-like agility and body balance. What they were lacking, though, was a way to quickly connect this natural movement to perception—the robotic equivalent of the reflexes that let you catch a ball or duck in an instant to avoid getting hit.
So, a team of scientists at ETH Zurich got busy fixing this problem. “I wanted to fuse perception and body movement,” said Yuntao Ma, a roboticist who led a team developing an AI-powered, badminton-playing robot.