#439286 MIT is Building a Dynamic, Acrobatic ...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. But we’re more or less past that now. 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. The next step seems to be to find ways of pushing the limits of human performance, which it turns out means acrobatics. 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. We’ve seen a variety of legged robots from MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab, including Cheetah and HERMES. Recently, they’ve been doing a bunch of work with their spunky little Mini Cheetahs (developed with funding and support from Naver Labs), which are designed for some dynamic stuff like gait exploration and some low-key four-legged acrobatics. In a paper recently posted to arXiv (to be presented at Humanoids 2020 in July), Matthew Chignoli, Donghyun Kim, Elijah Stanger-Jones, and Sangbae Kim describe “a new humanoid robot design, an actuator-aware kino-dynamic motion planner, and a landing controller as part of a practical system design for highly dynamic motion control of the humanoid robot.” So it’s not just the robot itself, but all of the software infrastructure necessary to get it to do what they want it to do. First let’s talk about the hardware that we’ll be looking at once the MIT Humanoid makes it out of simulation. It’s got the appearance of a sort of upright version of Mini Cheetah, but that appearance is deceiving, says MIT’s Matt Chignoli. While the robot’s torso and arms are very similar to Mini Cheetah, the leg design is totally new and features redesigned actuators with higher power and better torque density. “The main focus of the leg design is to enable smooth but dynamic ‘heel-to-toe’ actions that happen in humans’ walking and running, while maintaining low inertia for smooth interactions with ground contacts,” Chignoli told us in an email. “Dynamic ankle actions have been rare in humanoid robots. We hope to develop robust, low inertia and powerful legs that can mimic human leg actions.”
Now, it’s easy to say “oh well pfft that’s just in simulation and you can get anything to work in simulation,” which, yeah, that’s kinda true. But MIT is putting a lot of work into accurately simulating everything that they possibly can—in particular, they’re modeling the detailed physical constraints that the robot operates under as it performs dynamic motions, allowing the planner to take those constraints into account and (hopefully) resulting in motions that match the simulation pretty accurately. “When it comes to the physical capabilities of the robot, anything we demonstrate in simulation should be feasible on the robot,” Chignoli says. “We include in our simulations detailed models for the robot’s actuators and battery, models that have been validated experimentally. Such detailed models are not frequently included in dynamic simulations for robots.” But simulation is still simulation, of course, and no matter how good your modeling is, that transfer can be tricky, especially when doing highly dynamic motions. “Despite our confidence in our simulator’s ability to accurately mimic the physical capabilities of our robot with high fidelity, there are aspects of our simulator that remain uncertain as we aim to deploy our acrobatic motions onto hardware,” Chignoli explains. “The main difficulty we see is state estimation. We have been drawing upon research related to state estimation for drones, which makes use of visual odometry. Without having an assembled robot to test these new estimation strategies on, though, it is difficult to judge the simulation to real transfer for these types of things.” We’re told that the design of the MIT Humanoid is complete, and that the plan is to build it for real over the summer, with the eventual goal of doing parkour over challenging terrains. It’s tempting to fixate on the whole acrobatics and parkour angle of things (and we’re totally looking forward to some awesome videos), but according to Chignoli, the really important contribution here is the framework rather than the robot itself:
The MIT Humanoid Robot: Design, Motion Planning, and Control For Acrobatic Behaviors, by Matthew Chignoli, Donghyun Kim, Elijah Stanger-Jones, and Sangbae Kim from MIT and UMass Amherst, will be presented at Humanoids 2020 this July. You can read a preprint on arXiv here.
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