Design, Development and Experimental Realization of a Quadrupedal Research Platform: Stoch
This provides a research platform for exploring legged locomotion problems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing quadruped robot designs.
The authors tackled the problem of creating a robust and modular quadruped robot platform, resulting in the development of 'Stoch' with demonstrated capabilities including trotting, bounding, turning, and gait transitions.
In this paper, we present a complete description of the hardware design and control architecture of our custom built quadruped robot, called the `Stoch'. Our goal is to realize a robust, modular, and a reliable quadrupedal platform, using which various locomotion behaviors are explored. This platform enables us to explore different research problems in legged locomotion, which use both traditional and learning based techniques. We discuss the merits and limitations of the platform in terms of exploitation of available behaviours, fast rapid prototyping, reproduction and repair. Towards the end, we will demonstrate trotting, bounding behaviors, and preliminary results in turning. In addition, we will also show various gait transitions i.e., trot-to-turn and trot-to-bound behaviors.