Mini Cheetah (robot)
Mini Cheetah (robot)
The Mini Cheetah is a four legged robot developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2014.[2]
Overview
The robot was created by MIT's Biomimetic Robotics Lab, which, by 2014, could jump over obstacles while running. By 2018, the robot was able to climb stairs. The quadrepedal robot can perform dynamic physical feats like running, jumping and turning. The design is structured with modularity in mind so that the robot can be replicated with commercial off-the-shelf components at a low cost. [1]
The multipurpose structure is what makes the robot so useful.
Benjamin Katz, who worked on the robot with professor Sangbae Kim said:
"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"
The robot is actually a small, more streamlined version of it's bulky predecessor, Cheetah 3.
Technology
The robotic Mini Cheetah can run about around 9 miles per hour.
To keep itself upright, the Mini Cheetah has to make more 30 decisions per second.
It made headlines when it became the first robot to perform a backflip. [2]
Each robot has 12 small motors about the circumference of a tennis ball, and is composed of many moving parts: a stator; a small controller that conveys the amount of current the stator should produce; a magnet-lined rotor that rotates with the stator’s field; a gearbox that provides six times the torque that it normally would; and a position sensor that measures the angle and orientation of the motor and associated limb. Each leg is powered by three motors, which allow it to make fast, dynamic maneuvers without breaking gearboxes or limbs. Katz said about the design: [2]
“The rate at which it can change forces on the ground is really fast.
When it’s running, its feet are only on the ground for something like 150 milliseconds at a time, during which a computer tells it to increase the force on the foot, then change it to balance, and then decrease that force really fast to lift up.
So it can do really dynamic stuff, like jump in the air with every step, or run with two feet on the ground at a time.
Most robots aren’t capable of doing this, so move much slower.”
In November 2019, a video of nine mini cheetahs playing soccer was shared widely on social media. The video shows the robots kicking around a soccer ball on the school's Killian Court lawn. [666666]
Team
The Mini Cheetah was developed from Will Bosworth’s PhD research with Professor Sangbae Kim and Professor Neville Hogan, funded by the DARPA M3 program. Additional contributors include Debbie Ajilo, Michael Farid, Hans Susilo, Jonas Whitney and Michael Chuah. [10]
See Also
Boston Dynamics
Roo (Chatbot)