Skild AI's robot brain taught itself football in 140 simulated years

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Skild AI’s robot brain taught itself football in 140 simulated years

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Skild AI has taught its S1 robotics foundation model to play football by pitting it against earlier versions of itself inside NVIDIA’s Isaac Sim, with one goal: score. Over 140 simulated years it picked up dribbling, shielding and tackling on its own, and Skild then transferred the policy to a real humanoid for a match.

Lionel Messi made his Barcelona debut at 17. This robot didn’t play its first real match until it was 140.

That’s 140 years of football, all inside a simulator.

It comes from the Pittsburgh startup Skild AI.

Its brain is S1, a robotics model Skild launched in August that learns new tasks by watching humans.

The model was trained on human data and is capped at human skill.

So Skild borrowed the trick behind AlphaGo Zero, which beat the original AlphaGo 100 games to nil after three days of self-play.

Inside NVIDIA’s Isaac Sim, S1 has one objective and that is to score.

No human demos. It just played against earlier versions of itself, so every time it improved, so did its opponent.

For its first few simulated months, it could barely walk. By college age, it could get back up after a fall.

Then the skills showed up on their own: dribbling past defenders, shielding the ball, tackling.

In early four-player games, it even started passing and working as a team.

After 140 simulated years, Skild loaded the policy into a real humanoid and threw it into a match.

Skild says football was just the testbed. Next, it wants to see what self-play can do in virtual factories, construction sites and homes.

2 months ago

AI and Robotics

Skild AI's robot brain taught itself football in 140 simulated years

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