MIT teaches Cheetah robot to walk by touch

MIT has demonstrated the Cheetah 3. The institute teaches the four-legged friend to move blindly, relying on touch and not on cameras or other environmental sensors. The robot must be able to be used in disasters, among other things.

Robots shouldn’t rely too much on their eyesight, according to MIT’s robot designer Sangbae Kim: “Vision can be disruptive, inaccurate and sometimes not present.” That’s why he made Cheetah 3 rely more on tactile information.

This allows the cheetah to better deal with unexpected obstacles in fast movements. “What if a robot steps on something it can’t see? What does it do? Blind locomotion can help with that,” Kim said. In a video, MIT shows how Cheetah 3 can climb stairs, move sideways and take a beating.

MIT’s development team has developed two new algorithms for this: one for contact detection and one for model predictive control. The first determines, for example, how the robot should react when it steps on a twig, or on a stone. The second controls the amount of force when putting down a leg. The algorithm makes calculations for this 20 times per second, in order to be able to absorb unexpected situations.

MIT will announce more about Cheetah 3 in October at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots, in Madrid.