One giant leap for the mini cheetah robot

Progress in robotics is slow, but forthcoming in small steps! 

From the paper's abstract:

"Today's robotic quadruped systems can robustly walk over a diverse range of natural but continuous terrains involving snow, rain, slip, rubble, etc. Locomotion on discontinuous terrains such as one with gaps or obstacles presents a complementary set of challenges. It becomes necessary to plan ahead using visual inputs and execute agile behaviors such as jumps to cross gaps. Such dynamic motion results in significant motion of on-board camera that introduces a new set of challenges for real-time visual processing. The need for agility and the operation from vision reinforce the need for robust control. We present a system that can, in real-time, process visual observations from an onboard RGBD camera to command a quadruped robot to jump over wide gaps. ..."

One giant leap for the mini cheetah | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology A new control system, demonstrated using MIT’s robotic mini cheetah, enables four-legged robots to jump across uneven terrain in real-time [using computer vision].

Learning to Jump from Pixels (Paper webpage)

Learning to Jump from Pixels (CoRL 2021 paper)