Tencent Releases New-Generation Quadruped Robot

A new-generation four-legged robot developed by Tencent’s Robotics X Lab was released on August 8. Named Max, the new robot shows good maneuverability and can move accurately on complex terrain.

Max has excellent autonomous learning abilities, enabling it to learn new smart gaits within a few hours. Equipped with great navigation performance, it can also identify terrain conditions in real time and build a map model to find the center point of the pile surface, so that the speed of passing the pile is increased by four times.

According to Tencent, in order to better complete the challenge of robotic control accuracy brought by high dynamic actions such as jumping and somersaults, the Robotics X team developed a model-predictive control algorithm by combining offline optimal jumping trajectory planning and real-time balanced motion trajectory planning. The self-developed algorithm achieves the same control effect as the classical algorithms in the field in tracking translation motion, and it performs even better in tracking rotation motion.

In addition, the Robotics X team has added touchdown detection capabilities based on joint torque feedback to Max, so that the robot can accurately judge the touchdown state of its foot end when completing high dynamic movements such as jumping and forward somersaults.

Compared with the 2021 version, Max has completed a large number of structural and electrical system optimizations, so that it can maintain overall stability during high dynamic motions.

SEE ALSO: Tencent Unveils Four-legged Robot Dog That Can Run, Jump and Do Backward Somersaults

Different from industrial robots that do repetitive tasks from prepared rules, Robotics X Lab pays more attention to the research of robot’s autonomous characteristics, aimed at realizing the robot’s autonomous judgment, decision-making and task completion in dynamic environments with great uncertainty.