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cageymaru
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MIT has announced that its new mini cheetah robot is the first four-legged robot to do a backflip. It weighs in at 20 pounds and can quickly right itself if kicked over. The robot is capable of walking upside down, or right-side up and navigates uneven terrain with absolute ease. The modular design of the robot allows its motors to be swapped out "almost like Legos." "In Cheetah 3, everything is super integrated, so if you want to change something, you have to do a ton of redesign," Katz says. "Whereas with the mini cheetah, if you wanted to add another arm, you could just add three or four more of these modular motors." The design team has much bigger ideas on new features to add to the mini cheetah. "We're working now on a landing controller, the idea being that I want to be able to pick up the robot and toss it, and just have it land on its feet," Katz says. "Say you wanted to throw the robot into the window of a building and have it go explore inside the building. You could do that."
"A big part of why we built this robot is that it makes it so easy to experiment and just try crazy things, because the robot is super robust and doesn't break easily, and if it does break, it's easy and not very expensive to fix," says Katz, who worked on the robot in the lab of Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering. Kim says loaning mini cheetahs out to other research groups gives engineers an opportunity to test out novel algorithms and maneuvers on a highly dynamic robot, that they might not otherwise have access to. "Eventually, I'm hoping we could have a robotic dog race through an obstacle course, where each team controls a mini cheetah with different algorithms, and we can see which strategy is more effective," Kim says. "That's how you accelerate research."
"A big part of why we built this robot is that it makes it so easy to experiment and just try crazy things, because the robot is super robust and doesn't break easily, and if it does break, it's easy and not very expensive to fix," says Katz, who worked on the robot in the lab of Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering. Kim says loaning mini cheetahs out to other research groups gives engineers an opportunity to test out novel algorithms and maneuvers on a highly dynamic robot, that they might not otherwise have access to. "Eventually, I'm hoping we could have a robotic dog race through an obstacle course, where each team controls a mini cheetah with different algorithms, and we can see which strategy is more effective," Kim says. "That's how you accelerate research."
