Mini Cheetah Clone Teardown, by none other than the original designer

[Ben Katz] designed the original MIT Mini Cheetah robot, which easily captures attention and imagination with its decidedly non-robotic movements and backflips. Shortly after [Ben]'s master's thesis went live, clones of the actuators started appearing from overseas sellers, and a few months later clones of the entire robot. [Ben] recently had the opportunity to disassemble such a Dogotix clone and see what was inside.

Mini sheep, mini cheetah encounter.

Amusingly, one of the first things he noticed was that the "feet" are still just standard squash balls, identical to his original mini cheetah design. As with the rest of the leg, inside there is a belt that passes in front of turnbuckles, connecting the knee joint to an actuator in the shoulder.

As you would expect, these parts are under a bit of stress, so they need to be strong. This design allows for slender but strong legs without putting an actuator in the knee joint, and you may recall that we saw a similar robot gain the ability to stand through the addition of a rigid splint.

It's interesting to read [Ben]'s thoughts as he disassembles and photographs the unit, and you'll have to read his post to catch them all. But in the meantime, why not take a moment to see how a neighbour's curious sheep react to the robot in the video embedded below? The robot misses a back somersault due to low battery, but the sheep still seem suitably impressed.