LOOK:
CHEETAH 3
ROBOT
NAVIGATES
WITHOUT
EYES
The latest piece of manic machinery to come out of MIT is
its Cheetah 3 robot that is capable of navigating obstacles
such as stairs without having any form of ‘sight’.
The 40kg robot, instead, uses new algorithms to help it
navigate by touch.
Why no sight? “What if it steps on something that a
camera can’t see? What will it do?” says Sangbae Kim, a
mechanical engineering professor at MIT who designed the
robot. “That’s where blind locomotion can help. We don’t
want to trust our vision too much.”
The plan is for the robot to venture where humans can’t —
like deep inside power plants for inspections. “Dangerous,
dirty, and difficult work can be done much more safely
through remotely controlled robots,” Kim says. But a robot
may not be able to see in these environments; after all, the
radiation inside the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
power plant fried the camera on a robot sent in to hunt for
blobs of nuclear fuel.
That’s why the team used algorithms and sensors to give
the robot proprioception — a sense of where its body
is in space. The robot’s upgrades include changes to its
hardware that let it stretch and twist. It also has new
predictive algorithms that help the Cheetah 3 change up its
gait to keep from tripping or falling over.