  Quadrupedal robots are conquering various indoor and outdoor applications due
to their ability to navigate challenging uneven terrains. Exteroceptive
information greatly enhances this capability since perceiving their
surroundings allows them to adapt their controller and thus achieve higher
levels of robustness. However, sensors such as LiDARs and RGB cameras do not
provide sufficient information to quickly and precisely react in a highly
dynamic environment since they suffer from a bandwidth-latency tradeoff. They
require significant bandwidth at high frame rates while featuring significant
perceptual latency at lower frame rates, thereby limiting their versatility on
resource-constrained platforms. In this work, we tackle this problem by
equipping our quadruped with an event camera, which does not suffer from this
tradeoff due to its asynchronous and sparse operation. In leveraging the low
latency of the events, we push the limits of quadruped agility and demonstrate
high-speed ball catching for the first time. We show that our quadruped
equipped with an event camera can catch objects with speeds up to 15 m/s from 4
meters, with a success rate of 83%. Using a VGA event camera, our method runs
at 100 Hz on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin.
