Cheetah used to be able to do cartwheels, and now thanks to his new jumps he can navigate virtually any terrain.
If you follow the world of technology and especially that of robotic, surely the particular robotic animal sounds familiar to you Cheetah that MIT engineers have devised, in the form of a quadruped robot that already showed us long ago that it was even capable of doing cartwheels, and that now it can even take all kinds of jumps.
Now the latest version of this robot has a new system that allows it to jump through different gaps in the terrain based on a real-time video sensor capable of detecting potential obstacles, gaps and holes, so that it can calculate the different jumps and don’t fall for any of the traps.
“In these environments it is necessary to use vision to avoid holes and gaps. It’s hard to avoid a hole if you can’t see it. Although there are some methods of incorporating vision into locomotion on legs, most of them are not really suitable for use with emerging agile robotic systems.”, it states Gabriel Margolis, Professor of Computer Science in AI at MIT.
This system is able to focus on the depth of the terrain, and thanks to a neural network A target trajectory is delivered to a low-level controller that manages the 12 joints of the robot.
“With this controller we are using well specified models that we can impose constraints on, which is not normally possible in a learning based network“, Add.
It is one of the most agile robots that can be found right now, an advance that could cause these mechanical devices to help us with different tasks such as exploration or even rescue.