While Kim’s research interest is in building robots that could help people, such as the elderly in an aging population with fewer young people to perform services, such advancement is not even possible without understanding biology, biomechanics, and how much we don’t understand about our own everyday movements.

“We tend to think of a task’s difficulty based on human standards.”Įnter Kim’s class, 2.74 (Bio-Inspired Robotics).Īccording to Kim, researchers need to understand this cognitive bias, this tendency toward anthropomorphism, in order to even begin developing robots that can help humans with their physical movements.

“Achieving robot tasks that are seemingly easy for us is often extremely difficult and complicated,” says Kim. The backflip is basic when compared to an enormous repertoire of seemingly easy human behaviors like grasping a cup or moving food around in your mouth to chew it, which not only require more complicated feedback loops but are also very poorly understood because humans perform them automatically according to subconscious processes. In fact, the control algorithm for the backflip is surprisingly simple, says Sangbae Kim, director of the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory and professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. Or at least that is what most people might have thought.

If this machine - which also pranced around the stage like a show dog and stretched in several different directions - could perform such a difficult maneuver, one that is impossible for most humans, it should be easy to get it to perform all kinds of everyday tasks. When MIT’s mini cheetah perfectly executed a backflip on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” the audience screamed and applauded wildly.

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