Move over, Boston Dynamics, as there’s a new robot dog in town. Swedish startup IntuiCell has unveiled its AI model that learns and adapts to its environment, demonstrated through a robot dog named Luna.
While most traditional animal-like robots have been trained on specific movements using machine learning that they can then execute, IntuiCell has a different approach: an AI agent that educates itself autonomously. The company calls the concept a “digital nervous system,” as it mimics a biological nervous system and allows the robot to experiment, process, and adapt its interactions with the world.
A video shared by IntuiCell shows Luna learning to balance, stand, and walk from random limb movements that are gradually refined into the movements needed to perform various actions:
“For decades, AI has excelled at processing vast amounts of data but has fundamentally been incapable of real intelligence,” said Viktor Luthman, CEO and Co-Founder of IntuiCell. “Our system changes that. We’ve translated the principles of biological learning into software, enabling AI to evolve, adapt, and interact with the world in ways never previously envisaged. Through licensing our digital nervous system, we aim to become the infrastructure for all non-biological intelligence – empowering others to solve real-world problems we cannot foresee today, without a reliance on massive training datasets.”
The company makes some big claims about the potential of the AI technology and its use of a decentralized learning network that enables learning and adapting in real time. It has potential for use is fields such as deep sea or space exploration, or responding to emergency situations which would be dangerous for humans.
“IntuiCell’s AI is not just an improved version of machine learning; it is an entirely new category of intelligence,” said Udaya Rongala, Researcher and Co-Founder of IntuiCell. “Our work is rooted in 30 years of contrarian neuroscience research and built on a unique understanding of how intelligence emerges from the architecture and dynamics of the nervous system as a whole. The obsession with brute-force scaling, billions of parameters, more compute, and more data is an artifact of a fundamentally wrong approach to achieving intelligence. IntuiCell is not chasing a bigger-is-better paradigm. Intelligence is not our end-goal, but our starting point.”