LoCoQuad: A Low-Cost Arachnoid Quadruped Robot for Research and Education
This provides an affordable and open-source robotic platform for researchers and educators in robotics, though it is incremental as it focuses on cost reduction rather than new capabilities.
The authors tackled the problem of expensive and closed robotic platforms by developing LoCoQuad, a low-cost arachnoid quadruped robot priced at 150-165 USD, which they validated through experiments and made open-source for research and education.
Developing real robotic systems requires a tight integration of mechanics, electronics and software. Most of the times, existing robotic platforms are either closed or expensive or both, and in-house solutions are costly to develop and maintain. Open-source and low-cost designs are essential to facilitate the access to real robotic platforms and enable further progress in the field. LoCoQuad is an arachnoid quadruped platform that we designed targeting research and education in robotics. To meet these two ends, our platform allows for a high degree of flexibility and configurability. Our legged design has the lowest hardware cost of the state of the art, in the range of 150-165USD. We validated the robot platform by running several experiments showing over all functionalities. All the mechanical and electronic designs and all the software have been made open source and can be found at: https://github.com/TomBlackroad/LoCoQuad