Lausanne robot can jump like an antelope

The new EPFL robot. EPFL

A new four-legged robot with artificial intelligence can seamlessly change its gait. With the aim of avoiding falls, the robot from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) switches between walking, trotting and jumping depending on the situation.

The robot was developed to investigate why animals switch between different gaits, EPFL announced on Tuesday.

“Previous research has shown that animals change their gait to save energy and avoid musculoskeletal injuries,” explained robotics researcher Milad Shafiee in the EPFL press release. However, experiments with animals and robots have shown that these explanations do not always apply.

The EPFL researchers surmised that animals also change their gait in order to avoid falling. To investigate this in more detail, they taught the robot to move independently on different surfaces.

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Robots for biological research

This showed that the robot switched from walking to trotting on flat terrain to avoid falling over. And when the robot was confronted with holes in the ground, it switched from trotting to pronking, a sort of bounce jump with stiff legs which antelopes or cats do when they are frightened.

Viability – the ability not to fall – was therefore the only factor that was improved by such gait changes. The researchers published these results in the journal Nature Communications.

“It appears that energy efficiency, which was previously thought to be the driving force behind such transitions, is more likely a consequence. When an animal is moving in difficult terrain, its first priority is probably not to fall,” Shafiee said.

According to EPFL, the researchers hope that robots will be increasingly used in biological research in the future to reduce dependence on animals and the associated ethical concerns.

Translated from German by DeepL/ts

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