Mini Cheetah: A Platform for Pushing the Limits of Dynamic Quadruped Control

Mini Cheetah is a small and inexpensive, yet powerful and mechanically robust quadruped robot, intended to enable rapid development of control systems for legged robots. The robot uses custom backdriveable modular actuators, which enable high-bandwidth force control, high force density, and robustness to impacts. Standing around 0.3 m tall and weighing 9 kg, Mini Cheetah can easily be handled by a single operator. We have demonstrated dynamic trot, trot-run, bounding, and pronking gaits on the robot to speeds of up to 2.45 meters per second using Convex Model-Predictive Control (cMPC). In addition to locomotion, we have used the robot to execute 360° backflips, with trajectories generated using offline nonlinear optimization.

I. Introduction

Mini Cheetah is a lightweight, inexpensive, and high performance quadruped robot. Although the robot has a variety of uses in its own right, our primary motivation in developing the Mini Cheetah is to enable rapid development of control systems for legged robots, by allowing fearless experimentation on hardware.