It will leap over gaps effortlessly.
Mini Cheetah
The MIT engineers have done it again. This time they created a robotic cheetah who can leap.
According to MIT news releases, the designers added a new system to the robot that allows it jump over gaps in the terrain. The system uses a real-time video sensor to detect potential obstacles such as holes and gaps, and translate it into instructions for how the cheetah should respond.
You need vision to avoid failure in those situations, Gabriel Margolis, a professor at MIT of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, stated in the release. If you don't see the gap, it is hard to avoid crossing it. There are a few methods that can be used to incorporate vision into leg locomotion but they aren't suitable for emerging agile robotic systems.
Margolis was part of the team that created the mini cheetahs jumping systems. It's possible to see it in action here:
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Leap Speak
The vision system for mini cheetahs focuses on the terrain and feeds it into a neural network. This creates a target trajectory that is sent to a controller at the low level that controls the 12 bots joints.
Margolis stated in the release that the hierarchy, which includes the use of the low-level controller allows us to control the robots behavior and make it more well-behaved. We are using well-defined models that we can place constraints on. This is not possible with a learning-based network.
The cheetah robot can now leap. The cheetah can do a backflip, which we knew already. Let's hope it doesn't become self-conscious during SkyNet uprisings and pout on unsuspecting victims.
READ MORE: A giant leap for the mini cheetah (MIT News)
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