Cheetah-Cub Quadruped Robot Learns to Walk, Trot Using Gait Patterns from Real Animal

The rising interest in quadrupeds over the past few years has led to the development of several exciting new projects based on Cheetahs. One such robot is Cheetah-Cub, a compliant quadruped developed at the Biorobotics lab at the EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. To put Cheetah-Cub in motion, the EPFL group teamed up with researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), who have recently managed to transfer horse-like locomotion to the robot. EPFL's Cheetah-Cub quadruped, which weighs just 1.1 kg (2.4 lb) and is about the size of a housecat, is powered by Kondo KRS2350 hobby servos. It's a compliant robot that, like IIT's COMAN humanoid, is part of the AMARSi (Adaptive Modular Architectures for Rich Motor Skills) project, which seeks to "improve biological richness of robotic motor skills."