Robotic Fox Is Part Dog, Part Cat — Just Like The Real Thing

June 8, 2023 by Dan Maloney 8 Comments

Foxes are cat software running on dog hardware, or so they say. And [Will Cogley] seems to have taken that to heart with this 3D-printed robotic fox, which borrows heavily from projects like Boston Dynamics Spot robodog. True, the analogy breaks down a bit when you include MIT’s Cheetah on the inspiration list, but you get the point.

Very much a work in progress — [Will]’s RoboFox lacks both a head and a tail, which he aims to add at some point — there are some interesting design elements on display here. Whereas commercial quadruped robots tend to use expensive harmonic drives for the legs, [Will] chose simpler, cheaper hobby servos for his fox’s running gear. Each leg has three of them — one each for the upper and lower leg, and another that moves the whole leg in and out relative to the body. The dual-servo design for the leg is particularly interesting — one servo drives the upper leg directly, while the other servo drives the lower leg through a gear drive and a captive bearing arrangement connected to a parallelogram linkage. The result is a quite compact assembly that still has twelve degrees of freedom, and isn’t anywhere near as “floppy” as you might expect from something driven by hobby servos.

The video below shows off the design details as well as some of the fox’s construction, including some weirdly anatomically correct poses while it’s on its back. The fox is still getting its legs — you can see a few times when the servos get the jitters, and the umbilical is clearly a hindrance for such a lightweight robot. But [Will] has made a great start here, and we’re keen to see RoboFox progress. Although we’re not sure about giving the future head animatronic eyes.

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DIY Baby MIT Cheetah Robot

July 5, 2020 by Orlando Hoilett 7 Comments

3D printers have become a staple in most makerspaces these days, enabling hackers to rapidly produce simple mechanical prototypes without the need for a dedicated machine shop. We’ve seen many creative 3D designs here on Hackaday and [jegatheesan.soundarapandian’s] Baby MIT Cheetah Robot is no exception. You’ve undoubtedly seen MIT’s cheetah robot. Well, [jegatheesan’s] hack takes a personal spin on the cheetah robot and his results are pretty cool.

The body of the robot is 3D printed making it easy to customize the design and replace broken parts as you go. The legs are designed in a five-bar linkage with two servo motors controlling each of the four legs. An additional servo motor is used to rotate an HC-SR04, a popular ultrasonic distance sensor, used in the autonomous mode’s obstacle avoidance mechanism. The robot can also be controlled over Bluetooth using an app [jegatheesan] developed in MIT App Inventor.

Overall, the mechanics could use a bit of work — [jegatheesan’s] baby cheetah probably won’t outpace MIT’s robot any time soon — but it’s a cool hack and we’re looking forward to a version 3. Maybe the cheetah would make a cool companion bot?

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Robotic Cheetah Teaches A Motors Class

May 29, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 14 Comments

It seems like modern roboticists have decided to have a competition to see which group can develop the most terrifying robot ever invented. As of this writing the leading candidate seems to be the robot that can fuel itself by “eating” organic matter. We can only hope that the engineers involved will decide not to flesh that one out completely. Anyway, if we can get past the horrifying and/or uncanny valley-type situations we find ourselves in when looking at these robots, it turns out they have a lot to teach us about the theories behind a lot of complicated electric motors.

This research paper (gigantic PDF warning) focuses on the construction methods behind MIT’s cheetah robot. It has twelve degrees of freedom and uses a number of exceptionally low-cost modular actuators as motors to control its four legs. Compared to other robots of this type, this helps them jump a major hurdle of cost while still retaining an impressive amount of mobility and control. They were able to integrate a brushless motor, a smart ESC system with feedback, and a planetary gearbox all into the motor itself. That alone is worth the price of admission!

The details on how they did it are well-documented in the 102-page academic document and the source code is available on GitHub if you need a motor like this for any other sort of project, but if you’re here just for the cheetah doing backflips you can also keep up with the build progress at the project’s blog page. We also featured this build earlier in its history as well.

Cat Robot’s Secret To Slim Legs? Banish The Motors!

September 15, 2018 by Donald Papp 6 Comments

The first thing to notice about [Bijuo]’s cat-sized quadruped robot designs (link is in Korean, Google translation here) is how slim and sleek the legs are. That’s because unlike most legged robots, the limbs themselves don’t contain any motors. Instead, the motors are in the main body, with one driving a half-circle pulley while another moves the limb as a whole. Power is transferred by a cable acting as a tendon and is offset by spring tension in the joints. The result is light, slim legs that lift and move in a remarkable gait.

[Bijuo] credits the Cheetah_Cub project as their original inspiration, and names their own variation Mini Serval, on account of the ears and in keeping with the feline nomenclature. Embedded below are two videos, the first showing leg and gait detail, and the second demonstrating the robot in motion.

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Cheetah 3 Is Learning To Move Blindly Before Learning To See

July 11, 2018 by Steven Dufresne 23 Comments

Stand up right now and walk around for a minute. We’re pretty sure you didn’t see everywhere you stepped nor did you plan each step meticulously according to visual input. So why should robots do the same? Wouldn’t your robot be more versatile if it could use its vision to plan a path, but leave most of the walking to the legs with the help of various sensors and knowledge of joint positions?

That’s the approach [Sangbae Kim] and a team of researchers at MIT are taking with their Cheetah 3. They’ve given it cameras but aren’t using them yet. Instead, they’re making sure it can move around blind first. So far they have it walking, running, jumping and even going up stairs cluttered with loose blocks and rolls of tape.

Cheetah 3 jumping 30 inches onto a desk — Jumping 30 inches onto a desk

Two algorithms are at the heart of its being able to move around blind.

The first is a contact detection algorithm which decides if the legs should transition between a swing or a step based on knowledge of the joint positions and data from gyroscopes and accelerometers. If it tilted unexpectedly due to stepping on a loose block then this is the algorithm which decides what the legs should do.

The second is a model-predictive algorithm. This predicts what force a leg should apply once the decision has been made to take a step. It does this by calculating the multiplicative positions of the robot’s body and legs a half second into the future. These calculations are done 20 times a second. They’re what help it handle situations such as when someone shoves it or tugs it on a leash. The calculations enabled it to regain its balance or continue in the direction it was headed.

There are a number of other awesome features of this quadruped robot which we haven’t seen in others such as Boston Dynamics’ SpotMini like invertible knee joints and walking on three legs. Check out those features and more in the video below.

Of course, SpotMini has a whole set of neat features of its own. Let’s just say that while they look very similar, they’re on two different evolutionary paths. And the Cheetah certainly has evolved since we last looked at it a few years ago.

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You’d Print A Part, But Would You Print A Foot?

October 27, 2017 by James Hobson 22 Comments

Born with just one foot, [Nerraw99] had to work around prosthetics all his life. Finally getting fed up with the various shortcomings of his leather and foam foot, he designed, tweaked, printed and tested his own replacement!

After using Structure Sensor to scan both his feet, [Nerraw99] began tooling around with the model in Blender and 3D printing them at his local fablab/makerspace: MakerLabs. It ended up taking nearly a dozen printed iterations — multiple printing issues notwithstanding — to get the size right and the fit comfortable. Not all of the attempts were useless; one version turned out to be a suitable water shoe for days at the beach!

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HobbyKing Cheetah: Building Running Robots From Hobby Motors

June 24, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 15 Comments

[Ben Katz] is building a running robot from hobby level brushless motors, all on his blog under the tag, “HobbyKing Cheetah.”

One of the features of fancy modern industrial motor and controller sets is the ability for the motor to act as a mass-spring-damper. For example, let’s say you want a robot to hold an egg. You could have it move to the closed position, but tell the controller you only want to use so much force to do it. It will hold the egg as if there was a spring at its joint.

Another way you could use this is in the application of a robot leg. You tell the controller what kind of spring and shock absorber (damper) combination it is and it will behave as if those parts have been added to the mechanism. This is important if you want a mechanical leg to behave like a biological leg.

[Ben] had worked on a more formal project which used some very expensive geared motors to build a little running robot. It looks absolutely ridiculous, as you can see in the following video, but it gives an idea of where he’s going with this line of research. He wanted to see if he could replace all those giant geared motors with the cheap and ubiquitous high performance brushless DC motors for sale now. Especially given his experience with them.

So far he’s done a very impressive amount of work. He’s built a control board. He’s characterized different motors for the application. He’s written a lot of cool software; he can even change the stiffness and damping settings on the fly. He has a single leg that can jump. It’s cool. He’s taking a hiatus from the project, but he’ll be right back at it soon. We’re excited for the updates!