The cheetah is the fastest living animal, reaching up to 60 miles per hour as it bounds across the African plains. A new robot from MIT is the "cheetah" of robots, going faster than any robot before it.
This 70-pound hunk of gears and metal may not look a whole lot like an actual cheetah, but the engineers at MIT have replicated important, hard-to-make qualities of a real-life cheetah: its ability to run fast, run silently and jump over obstacles without losing speed. This robot also can run autonomously, which means that it could potentially be used for activities such as recovery missions to track down and bring back humans in natural disasters, potentially replacing or adding to human aid workers. The possibilities for a robot that can run by itself for up to two hours in the field, and run faster than humans, are staggering.
One thing that sets this "cheetah" apart from its predecessors is its engine: it is powered by electric motors that produce energy efficiently. The engineers also cracked the algorithm to make the robot successfully run up to 10 miles per hour. The trick is having each of the four legs use force as soon as it touches the ground. Sangbae Kim, one of the researchers, compared this to how sprinters run.
"Many sprinters, like Usain Bolt, don't cycle their legs really fast," Kim said. "They actually increase their stride length by pushing downward harder and increasing their ground force, so they can fly more while keeping the same frequency."
So far, a test has confirmed that this robot can run up to 10 miles per hour over a course that includes obstacles. However, the limits for this robot may be further still. The team thinks that this model of the robot could potentially reach up to 30 miles per hour. This is a big feat in robotics, the first of its kind. Other robots have the potential to match the force of this "cheetah," as the researchers said, but with far less efficiency.
The robot's body still does not look natural, as you can see in this video, but the movement is really incredible. The team speculates that this technology could eventually be used to make very responsive prosthetic legs, or a technology that could replace cars.
The team has been working on this project since 2013. Their work is funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
