Blind robotic cheetah gallops over obstacles

Instead, the Labrador-sized Cheetah 3 robot "feels" its way through its surroundings, opening up potential applications for exploring disaster zones and other dangerous or inaccessible environments.

"Vision can be noisy, slightly inaccurate, and sometimes not available, and if you rely too much on vision, your robot has to be very accurate in position and eventually will be slow,” said the system’s designer, Prof Sangbae Kim. “We want the robot to rely more on tactile information. That way, it can handle unexpected obstacles while moving fast."

Commenting on potential applications for the robot Kim said: "Cheetah 3 is designed to do versatile tasks such as power plant inspection, which involves various terrain conditions including stairs, curbs, and obstacles on the ground."

The robot owes its abilities to new algorithms developed by Kim's team: a contact detection algorithm, and a model-predictive control algorithm.

The contact detection algorithm uses data from gyroscopes, accelerometers and the joint positions of the legs to help the robot determine the best time for a given leg to switch from swinging in the air to stepping on the ground. For example, if it steps on a light twig versus a hard, heavy rock, how it reacts - and whether it continues to carry through with a step, or pulls back and swings its leg instead - can make or break its balance.