Mini Cheetah: A Platform for Pushing the Limits of Dynamic Quadruped Control
By Benjamin Katz, Jared Di Carlo, Sangbae Kim. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2019
535 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Mini Cheetah is a small and inexpensive, yet powerful and mechanically robust quadruped robot, intended to enable rapid development of control systems for legged robots. The robot uses custom backdriveable modular actuators, which enable high-bandwidth force control, high force density, and robustness to impacts. Standing around 0.3 m tall and weighing 9 kg, Mini Cheetah can easily be handled by a single operator. We have demonstrated dynamic trot, trot-run, bounding, and pronking gaits on the robot to speeds of up to 2.45 meters per second using Convex Model-Predictive Control (cMPC). In addition to locomotion, we have used the robot to execute 360° backflips, with trajectories generated using offline nonlinear optimization.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Control and Systems Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb7e50d5d25ebf46f04c6d8cabdaac72a0e9d297
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Biomedical Engineering
- Marco Hutter
- Jemin Hwangbo
- Vladlen Koltun
- Lorenz Wellhausen
- Benjamin Katz
- Jared Di Carlo
- Sangbae Kim
- Jie Tan
In Control and Systems Engineering
- Marco Hutter
- Jemin Hwangbo
- Vladlen Koltun
- Sergey Levine
- Jie Tan
- Lorenz Wellhausen
- Takahiro Miki
- Peng Xu
Citations in the corpus
- Learning to Walk in the Real World with Minimal Human Effort (2020, background): “For instance, researchers have demonstrated agile locomotion with quadrupedal robots using a state-machine [11], impulse scaling [42], and convex model predictive control [34].”
- Learning robust perceptive locomotion for quadrupedal robots in the wild (2022, background): “Existing controllers avoid catastrophic failures by simply refraining from using visual information in outdoor environments (2, 4, 38) or by adding heu ristically defined reflex rules (43, 44).”
- Highly Dynamic Quadruped Locomotion via Whole-Body Impulse Control and Model Predictive Control (2019, methodology): “Considering the size of the robot, the speed is comparable to the state-of-the-art such as WildCat (8 m/s) and Cheetah 2 (6.4 m/s), but was limited by the stability of the previous MPC-only controller, rather than the Mini-Cheetah hardware.”