Engineers at MIT have done something exceptional yet again. The team has created a robotic cheetah that can now leap over gaps. The robot called “mini cheetah” was fitted with a new system that enables it to jump over gaps in the terrain, as per an MIT news release.
The system depends on a real-time video sensor that can detect potential obstacles like gaps and holes, and converts them into instruction on how the robot should react.
Vision system helps robot leap
“In those settings, you need to use vision in order to avoid failure,” said Gabriel Margolis, a professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at MIT. “For example, stepping in a gap is difficult to avoid if you can’t see it. Although there are some existing methods for incorporating vision into legged locomotion, most of them aren’t really suitable for use with emerging agile robotic systems.”
The robot’s vision system focuses on the depth of incoming terrain, feeding that information into a neural network that provides a target trajectory to a low-level controller that handles the mini cheetah’s 12 joints.
“The hierarchy, including the use of this low-level controller, enables us to constrain the robot’s behavior so it is more well-behaved,” Margolis said in the release. “With this low-level controller, we are using well-specified models that we can impose constraints on, which isn’t usually possible in a learning-based network.”
The future seems bright for robotics
Previously, a team of researchers developed a new exoskeleton that can help people with leg amputations. It offers them the ability to walk upright, using a system that extends their residual limb into a full robotic leg. The system features sensors and processors that analyze the user’s movements in order to make walking easy, as per the research published in the journal Nature Medicine.
The exoskeleton boosts the user’s leg to make walking feel more natural and they don’t need to spend energy to take steps. In a press release, Tommaso Lenzi, an engineer from the University of Utah and lead developer, has compared it using an electric bike to travel uphill.
