Katz came up with the electric motor design by reconfiguring the parts to small, commercially available motors normally used in drones and remote-controlled airplanes.Įach of the robot’s 12 motors is about the size of a Mason jar lid, and consists of: a stator, or set of coils, that generates a rotating magnetic field a small controller that conveys the amount of current the stator should produce a rotor, lined with magnets, that rotates with the stator’s field, producing torque to lift or rotate a limb a gearbox that provides a 6:1 gear reduction, enabling the rotor to provide six times the torque that it normally would and a position sensor that measures the angle and orientation of the motor and associated limb.Įach leg is powered by three motors, to give it three degrees of freedom and a huge range of motion. “Whereas with the mini cheetah, if you wanted to add another arm, you could just add three or four more of these modular motors.” “In Cheetah 3, everything is super integrated, so if you want to change something, you have to do a ton of redesign,” Katz says. The mini cheetah is more than just a miniature version of its predecessor, Cheetah 3, a large, heavy, formidable robot, which often needs to be stabilized with tethers to protect its expensive, custom-designed parts. “Eventually, I’m hoping we could 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,” Kim says. Kim says loaning mini cheetahs out to other research groups gives engineers an opportunity to test out novel algorithms and maneuvers on a highly dynamic robot, that they might not otherwise have access to. “A big part of why we built this robot is that it makes it so easy to experiment and just try crazy things, because the robot is super robust and doesn’t break easily, and if it does break, it’s easy and not very expensive to fix,” says Katz, who worked on the robot in the lab of Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering. They are currently building more of the four-legged machines, aiming for a set of 10, each of which they hope to loan out to other labs. The researchers will present the mini cheetah’s design at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in May. “You could put these parts together, almost like Legos,” says lead developer Benjamin Katz, a technical associate in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. Each motor can easily be swapped out for a new one. Videos of the recorded seminars will be posted about a week after the talk.In the event that a limb or motor does break, the mini cheetah is designed with modularity in mind: Each of the robot’s legs is powered by three identical, low-cost electric motors that the researchers engineered using off-the-shelf parts. For more information the colloquia and to see the past colloquia, please visit here. The International Foundation of Robotics Research (IFRR) is hosting a bi-weekly colloquia to "provide a platform for open discussion and interaction on diverse themes in robotics". Robotics Today is on permanent hiatus! Thanks for your attendance throughout the year! Please enjoy the previous talks, listed below, or check out the MIT Robotics Seminar and the Stanford AI Events Calendar. And follow us on Twitter! Upcoming Seminars ics file) and view past seminars on the Robotics Today Youtube Channel. Stay up to date with upcoming seminars with the Robotics Today Google Calendar (or download the. The format of the seminar consists of a technical talk live captioned and streamed via Web and Twitter followed by an interactive discussion between the speaker and a panel of faculty, postdocs, and students that will moderate audience questions. The seminars are scheduled on Fridays at 3PM EDT (12PM PDT) and are open to the public. The goal of the series is to bring the robotics community together during these challenging times. "Robotics Today - A series of technical talks" is a virtual robotics seminar series.
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