[Ben Katz] posted about bringing the Mini Cheetah (center, above) robot to the 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) held in Montréal, where it shared the floor with others for a workshop focusing on real-world deployment of legged robots. Those of you who haven’t been keeping up with legged robots may find yourselves delightfully surprised at the agility and fluid movements of this robot. Mini Cheetah may lack the effectors or sensors of the bigger units, but its nimbleness is undeniable.
[Ben] shared some footage of the robots together, and at about 7:22 in this video Mini Cheetah can be seen showing off a bit of flexing, followed by running around a larger unit. Another, shorter video is embedded below where you can see all the attendees moving about in a rare opportunity see them all together. You can even see the tiny one-legged hopping robot Salto if you watch closely!
The Mini Cheetah robot has been something of a favorite here at Hackaday. The inspired design, the detailed documentation, and the effective use of low-cost parts all help make it a fascinating project to read up on.
GO BEN!
That was great…..now tell us what that one-legged hopping thing was toward the end of the video?
https://hackaday.com/2019/05/25/one-legged-robot-does-the-hop/
Wow, that little bugger is really agile, I’m impressed, but I have one question, did the little robot take a poop at 13 seconds into the video?
Yup, and thus Article 13 was born.
circus mechs
Impressive collection of hobbyists and successful robots.
Thought about how to write down this impression but you nailed it…
Check out all the videos for sure. Watching the mini cheetah do backflips is crazy. The agility of this little thing is really impressive. The ability to right itself when it gets tripped up by a mix of things at one point, is also super impressive.
Keep up the good work man, cause you’ve got something that is going places thats for sure.
It would get an even bigger impression if it had a skin of some sort, head and tail, perhaps a friendly looking fox form. The size is about right.
Paper: “A low cost modular actuator for dynamic robots”
Abstract:
This thesis details the hardware and control development for a low-cost modular actuator, intended for use in highly dynamic robots. A small 12 degree of freedom quadruped robot has built using these actuators, on which several control experiments have been performe…
Link: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/118671