![]() We know that IHMC has been developing their own child-size acrobatic humanoid named Nadia, and now it sounds like researchers from Sangbae Kim’s lab at MIT are working on a new acrobatic robot of their own. The next step seems to be to find ways of pushing the limits of human performance, which it turns out means acrobatics. Thanks to the talented folks at companies like Agility Robotics and Boston Dynamics, we now expect bipedal robots to meet or exceed actual human performance for at least a small subset of dynamic tasks. "We also plan to incorporate a perception system into our control algorithm, to make robots be more capable to response to the change of external environment.For a long time, having a bipedal robot that could walk on a flat surface without falling over (and that could also maybe occasionally climb stairs or something) was a really big deal. "We will now test the developed control algorithm in the real robot and keep pushing forward the dynamic capability of legged robots," Kim said. Meanwhile, the researchers plan to test their design, motion planner and control algorithm in real world scenarios. In the future, the MIT humanoid robot could prove to be highly efficient for completing a wide range of complex missions. Their findings are highly promising, as they show that the MIT humanoid robot should be able to perform a variety of acrobatic behaviors, including back flips, front flips and spinning jumps. Kim and his colleagues have tested their robot design, motion planner, and landing controller in realistic simulations. "In this work, we tried to address the critical hardware limits at dynamic motion in our control algorithm based on the accumulated experience and knowledge on robot hardware." "Performing dynamic motions is challenging for robots because their operator must first understand the correlation between hardware and software," Donghyun Kim said. This should allow it to complete more demanding and complex tasks. In contrast with other humanoid robots developed in the past, the new robot designed by one of the researchers in the team, called Sangbae Kim, is extremely dynamic and efficient. The same actuator technology, represented by highly back-drivable, rapid and accurate torque control, and compact and robust form factor, will be used in the new humanoid robot." "Actuator technologies have been dramatically improved, and we have demonstrated the outstanding performance in the quadruped robots, MIT Cheetah 1, 2, 3 and mini-cheetah robots. ![]() "The most notable difference between the new humanoid robot we developed and other humanoid robots developed in the past would be the actuators," Kim said. Combined with the humanoid robot design they proposed, this method could enable more dynamic movements, such as acrobatics. Kim and his colleague developed a new method that can handle the constraints associated with highly dynamic robot behaviors during motion planning and control. Most existing robot designs, however, do not fully address hardware-related challenges and aspects, such as the drop in voltage that can occur during high torque/velocity motions. To perform highly dynamic behaviors, robots typically need to make efficient use of actuators. "To do that, we first experimentally identified the actuator performance and then represent the primary limitations in our motion planner." "In this work, we tried to come up with realistic control algorithm to make a real humanoid robot perform acrobatic behavior such as back/front/side-flip, spinning jump, and jump over an obstacle," Donghyun Kim, one of the researchers who developed the robot's software and controller, told TechXplore. This design, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could allow the humanoid robot to perform back flips and other acrobatic movements. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of Massachusetts Amherst recently designed a new humanoid robot supported by an actuator-aware kino-dynamic motion planner and a landing controller.
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