Have a look at the jumping four-legged robot from MIT

Engineers from MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, created a jumping four-legged robot and boasted about their “mini cheetah”. Its uniqueness boils down to the possibility of jumping through irregular gaps with high speed and agility, and in addition in real time.

A demonstration of the unique four-legged robot from MIT

The robot itself has 12 joints that are controlled by a controller that takes actions based on equations describing motion. Engineers used a new technology for this, which is based on a real-time video sensor. This one detects potential obstacles and interprets them to give instructions on how the cheetah should act to overcome them. The vision system focuses on the depth of the terrain, which is sent to the neural network, which “learns” continuously from successive trials.

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The hierarchy, including the use of a low-level controller, allows us to limit the robot’s behavior, making it behave better. Thanks to this low-level controller, we use well-defined models on which we can impose restrictions, which is usually not possible in a learning-based network

– explains Dr. Gabriel Margolis, who participated in the work.

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This innovative two-component technology means the robot can travel anywhere without having to map the terrain first. On the one hand, it has a high-level controller based on a neural network, which has been trained using the trial and error method. However, in practice, not only he is responsible for individual movements, because they are directly influenced by the aforementioned vision system, viewing the environment in real time.