Teaching Robots Not to Faceplant

Robots may not feel pain or embarrassment, but they still have good reasons to avoid a wipeout. Their parts are expensive, for one thing, and they're lousy at healing their own scrapes. And robots that walk around on two legs are bound to take some spectacular spills. That's why researchers are working on a way to teach robots to fall a little more gracefully. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, Sehoon Ha and Karen Liu created an algorithm that plans the safest way for a robot to fall