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RAIBO Runs over Walls with Feline Agility... Ready for Effortless Search over Mountaineous and Rough Terrains
< Photo 1. Research Team Photo (Professor Jemin Hwangbo, second from right in the front row) >
KAIST's quadrupedal robot, RAIBO, can now move at high speed across discontinuous and complex terrains such as stairs, gaps, walls, and debris. It has demonstrated its ability to run on vertical walls, leap over 1.3-meter-wide gaps, sprint at approximately 14.4 km/h over stepping stones, and move quickly and nimbly on terrain combining 30° slopes, stairs, and stepping stones. RAIBO is expected to be deployed soon for practical missions such as disaster site exploration and mountain searches.
Professor Jemin Hwangbo's research team in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at our university announced on June 3rd that they have developed a quadrupedal robot navigation framework capable of high-speed locomotion at 14.4 km/h (4m/s) even on discontinuous and complex terrains such as walls, stairs, and stepping stones.
The research team developed a quadrupedal navigation system that enables the robot to reach its target destination quickly and safely in complex and discontinuous terrain.
To achieve this, they approached the problem by breaking it down into two stages: first, developing a planner for planning foothold positions, and second, developing a tracker to accurately follow the planned foothold positions.
First, the planner module quickly searches for physically feasible foothold positions using a sampling-based optimization method with neural network-based heuristics and verifies the optimal path through simulation rollouts.
While existing methods considered various factors such as contact timing and robot posture in addition to foothold positions, this research significantly reduced computational complexity by setting only foothold positions as the search space. Furthermore, inspired by the walking method of cats, the introduction of a structure where the hind feet step on the same spots as the front feet further significantly reduced computational complexity.
< Figure 1. High-speed navigation across various discontinuous terrains >
Second, the tracker module is trained to accurately step on planned positions, and tracking training is conducted through a generative model that competes in environments of appropriate difficulty.
The tracker is trained through reinforcement learning to accurately step on planned plots, and during this process, a generative model called the 'map generator' provides the target distribution.
This generative model is trained simultaneously and adversarially with the tracker to allow the tracker to progressively adapt to more challenging difficulties. Subsequently, a sampling-based planner was designed to generate feasible foothold plans that can reflect the characteristics and performance of the trained tracker.
This hierarchical structure showed superior performance in both planning speed and stability compared to existing techniques, and experiments proved its high-speed locomotion capabilities across various obstacles and discontinuous terrains, as well as its general applicability to unseen terrains.
Professor Jemin Hwangbo stated, "We approached the problem of high-speed navigation in discontinuous terrain, which previously required a significantly large amount of computation, from the simple perspective of how to select the footprint positions. Inspired by the placements of cat's paw, allowing the hind feet to step where the front feet stepped drastically reduced computation. We expect this to significantly expand the range of discontinuous terrain that walking robots can overcome and enable them to traverse it at high speeds, contributing to the robot's ability to perform practical missions such as disaster site exploration and mountain searches."
This research achievement was published in the May 2025 issue of the international journal Science Robotics.
Paper Title: High-speed control and navigation for quadrupedal robots on complex and discrete terrain, (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.ads6192)YouTube Link: https://youtu.be/EZbM594T3c4?si=kfxLF2XnVUvYVIyk
2025.06.04 View 14095 -
KAIST's Patina Engraving System Awarded at ACM CHI
Professor Tek-Jin Nam’s research team of the Industrial Design Department of KAIST received the Best Paper Award in the 2015 Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) which was held from April 18 to 23, 2015. The team consisted of two KAIST students: Moon-Hwan Lee, a Ph.D. candidate, and Sejin Cha, a master's student. The team was the first in Asia to receive the award.
The ACM CHI represents the premier conference in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This year’s event, held in Seoul, South Korea, was the first conference that the ACM had held in Asia in its thirty-three year history. The KAIST team’s paper, entitled “Patina Engraver: Visualizing Activity Logs as Patina in Fashionable Trackers,” ranked in the top 1% of 2,000 submitted papers.
The team developed Patina Engraver, an activity tracker, which monitors and tracks fitness-related metrics such as distances walked or run, calorie consumption, heartbeat, sleep quality, and blood pressure. The device wirelessly connects to a computer or smartphone so that it can store and utilize long-term tracking data.
However, what makes Patina Engraver, a smart wristband, different from other health trackers is its ability to display different design patterns based on users’ activity on the surface of the wristband. The research team was inspired to build this system from the fact that wearable electronics including activity trackers can be used not only as health care devices, but also as fashion items to express emotions and personalities.
Equipped with an engraving feature, the charging pad or holder for Patina Engraver draws individualized patterns to reflect the user’s activities, such as walking or running, while the device is being charged. The pattern display syncs with the frequency of usage, therefore, the more the tracker is used, the greater the number of patterns will show up.
According to the team, since Patina Engraver provides users with a personalized illustration of their activity on the tracker, users are more motivated to put on the tracker and exercise.
Professor Nam said, “This research can be applied in producing other wearable devices to enhance users’ emotional satisfaction. When wearable technology is combined with design and emotion, the industry market will quickly expand.”
Figure 1: Patina engraving system developed by KAIST research team
Figure 2: The process of engraving illustrations of the activity records onto the tracker
Figure 3: Personalized activity trackers based on activity records
2015.05.15 View 20883