The Mini Cheetah Robot

Back during my second year of undergrad I started scheming about building legged robots out of cheap hobby brushless motors.  Two years later as a senior, I finally made a first-pass at building some of the hardware - motor controllers, gearboxes, and a two-degree of freedom leg.  Things look promising, so I stayed at MIT to do a masters in Sangbae's lab continuing the project.  The Mini Cheetah robot is the result of that work:

Photo: Bryce Vickmark

First quadruped robot to do a backflip!

The first version of the robot was put together in March 2018.  I spent the summer after finishing my Masters helping get the robot fully up and running (literally).  When we saw how well everything worked, we decided to build a handful more of the robots, both for our lab and to loan out to other research groups to experiment on.  I spent about a year doing some design revisions and building 10 more of the robots.

The robot is probably best documented in my masters thesis, but there are also several blog-posts as well.

Here are several papers (in no particular order) published about the robot or  using it.  I'll keep updating this list as I hear about more publications using the robot

• Mini cheetah: A platform for pushing the limits of dynamic quadruped control
• Benjamin Katz, Jared Di Carlo, Sangbae Kim
• Highly Dynamic Quadruped Locomotion via Whole-Body Impulse Control and Model Predictive Control
• Donghyun Kim, Jared Di Carlo, Benjamin Katz, Gerardo Bledt, Sangbae Kim
• Vision aided dynamic exploration of unstructured terrain with a small-scale quadruped robot
• D Kim, D Carballo, J Di Carlo, B Katz, G Bledt, B Lim, S Kim
• Hybrid Systems Differential Dynamic Programming for Whole-Body Motion Planning of Legged Robots
• He Li, Patrick M. Wensing
• Model Hierarchy Predictive Control of Robotic Systems
• He Li, Robert J. Frei, Patrick M. Wensing
• Regularized predictive control framework for robust dynamic legged locomotion
• Bledt, Gerardo.
• Extracting Legged Locomotion Heuristics with Regularized Predictive Control
• Gerardo Bledt; Sangbae Kim
• Variational-Based Optimal Control of Underactuated Balancing for Dynamic Quadrupeds
• M Chignoli, PM Wensing 
•  Robust Autonomous Navigation of a Small-Scale Quadruped Robot in Real-World Environments. 
• Dudzik, Thomas & Chignoli, Matthew & Bledt, Gerardo & Lim, Bryan & Miller, Adam & Kim, Donghyun & Kim, Sangbae. 
• Concurrent Training of a Control Policy and a State Estimator for Dynamic and Robust Legged Locomotion
• Gwanghyeon Ji, Juhyeok Mun, Hyeongjun Kim, Jemin Hwangbo
• Learning to Jump from Pixels
• Gabriel B. Margolis, Tao Chen, Kartik Paigwar, Xiang Fu, Donghyun Kim, Sangbae Kim, Pulkit Agrawa
• Agile Locomotion via Model-free Learning
• Gabriel Margolis*, Ge Yang*, Kartik Paigwar, Tao Chen, Pulkit Agrawal