'Blind' Cheetah 3 robot can climb stairs littered with obstacles: Improved design may be used for exploring disaster zones

Instead, it nimbly "feels" its way through its surroundings in a way that engineers describe as "blind locomotion," much like making one's way across a pitch-black room. "There are many unexpected behaviors the robot should be able to handle without relying too much on vision," says the robot's designer, Sangbae Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. "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. So we want the robot to rely more on tactile information. That way, it can handle unexpected obstacles while moving fast." Researchers will present the robot's vision-free capabilities in October at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots, in Madrid.