MIT's Mini Cheetah Robot Can Backflip

MIT has developed a new robot as a successor to its large and heavy Cheetah 3, and this one looks almost impossible to stop if it goes rogue, but thankfully it's quite tiny.

The new mini cheetah is a quadruped weighing just 20 pounds. MIT describes the robot as having a range of motion "that rivals a champion gymnast" including the ability to walk right-side up or upside down. Its party trick is performing a 360-degree backflip, but the robot's speed and agility are its most impressive features.

As the video above reveals, the mini cheetah can cope with being kicked on multiple points of its body. If it falls, it can get back up, and the range of motion its legs have combined with excellent balance means it can navigate just about any type of terrain. Better than that, though, it can do so twice as fast as an average human's walking speed.

The mini cheetah is "virtually indestructible" according to the research team at MIT, but also designed like Lego so as to be cheap and quick to repair. Each of the robot's four legs has three identical, cheap electric motors that can quickly be replaced for very little expense. By using three motors per leg, the robot benefits from three degrees of freedom and a much greater range of motion.

According to Benjamin Katz, a technical associate in MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, by making the mini cheetah so hard-wearing and cheap to fix, it allows for experimentation. There's also a plan to create 10 of the robots to lend out to other research labs, but also because it's Katz's desire to, "have a robotic dog race through an obstacle course, where each team controls a mini cheetah with different algorithms, and we can see which strategy is more effective."

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