Meet MIT’s Mini Cheetah

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MIT’s Super Mini Cheetah is small, cute, inexpensive, and somewhat comical with its stuffed animal head. It’s capable of walking, jumping, running, and turning, all while its furry head wobbles with each step. Beyond the comical look, the Mini Cheetah is an impressive demonstration of how commercial off-the-shelf components can be used to create a pretty advanced robot that follows the design of more advanced robots, such as the MIT Cheetah with a low-cost rapid manufacturing process.

The Mini Cheetah may be low cost, but it’s not low performance. It’s “powerful enough to perform dynamic locomotion and lightweight and inexpensive enough to simplify many logistical challenges of performing safe experiments with large robots such as the MIT Cheetah,” reads the press release.

The low cost and low effort production, MIT hopes, will inspire and enable other researchers “share hardware-implementable control implementations on replicable hardware across the world.”

The Mini Cheetah was created by MIT PhD candidate Will Bosworth, under the tutelage of Professor Sangbae Kim and Professor Neville Hogan. Funding for the project was gained from the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through its Maximum Mobility and Manipulation (M3) programme.

The M3 programme seeks to advance both engineering and science in the field of ground robots, with an emphasis on improving robots’ actuators – the motors that are responsible for controlling and moving systems and mechanisms.

The Super Mini Cheetah design is not yet available, but should be released soon after publication. Interested researchers and hobbyists should get in touch with Will Bosworth for further details.