The Mini Cheetah is smaller, stripped down version of the Cheetah III being developed at the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering's Biomimetic Robotics Lab under the direction of Associate Professor Sangbae Kim. Weighing only 20 pounds it can bend and swing its legs wide, enabling it to walk either right side up or upside down. It can also trot over uneven terrain about twice as fast as an average person's walking speed and has been trained to do backflips..
Back in 2015 Cheetah II made headlines, including ours for its dynamic legged gait, speed, jumping ability, and biomimetic design. Now Professor Kim's team is working on a third generation of the quadruped robots designed for ground mobility. In an interview about the Cheetah III, Kim explained:
“With the Cheetah project, I was initially motivated by copying land animals, but I also realized there was a gap in ground mobility. We have conquered air and water transportation, but we haven’t conquered ground mobility...
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