Thanks to its legs, whose design faithfully reproduces feline morphology, EPFL’s four-legged “cheetah-cub robot” has the same advantages as its model: It is small, light and fast. Still in its experimental stage, the robot will serve as a platform for research in locomotion and biomechanics.
The robot is the fastest in its category, namely in normalized speed for small quadruped robots under 30 kg. During tests, it demonstrated its ability to run nearly seven times its body length in one second. Although not as agile as a real cat, it still has excellent auto-stabilization characteristics when running at full speed or over a course that included disturbances such as small steps. In addition, the robot is extremely light, compact, and robust and can be easily assembled from materials that are inexpensive and readily available.
Robots developed from this concept could eventually be used in search-and-rescue missions or for exploration.
Also: Learn about a Robotic Ankle for Omnidirectional Rock Anchors.
Transcript
00:00:04 we're developing cheetak cab robot which is robot of about the size of a house cat um we're looking also into biomechanics uh We've developed it for very fast Locomotion in this case we mimicked a lot of the morphology of a house cat uh so we use the segmented leg design for both the front and the hind leg we're using Springs as a replacement for tendons uh we're using actuators uh
00:00:24 per leg as a replacement for the muscles and eventually the goal is to have a robot which is easy to use it's very robust uh it's very fast and eventually it's it's also very dynamically running and kind of naturally running the sum of mology and control enables us to run this robot very fast so up to 1.4 m/ second this is about seven body lengths per second uh besides this very fast
00:00:47 speed it's also very robust so we can have the robot running over step down obstacles of up to 20% of its leg length and the very big potential for Leed robots is um application or applications in rough terrain like exploration applications for example you can think of a human or you can think of an animal which is climbing through the mountains it's much much harder for an for a
00:01:07 machine with wheels or with tracks to to do this type of terrain of course this research is very we're still at a very basic step um but this is definitely one of the goals
