Deploying COTS Legged Robot Platforms into a Heterogeneous Robot Team
This work addresses the practical deployment of legged robots in mixed teams for scenarios like unstructured terrain traversal, but it is incremental as it focuses on integration and testing rather than novel solutions.
The paper tackled the problem of integrating commercial-off-the-shelf legged robots into heterogeneous teams by deploying Ghost Robotics' Vision 60 and Boston Dynamics' Spot in experiments to assess their performance on different terrains compared to other platforms, providing insights into real-world deployment challenges.
The recent availability of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) legged robot platforms have opened up new opportunities in deploying legged systems into different scenarios. While the main advantage of legged robots is their ability to traverse unstructured terrain, there are still large gaps between what robot platforms can achieve and their animal counterparts. Therefore, when deploying as part of a heterogeneous robot team of different platforms, it is beneficial to understand the different scenarios where a legged platform would perform better than a wheeled, tracked or aerial platform. Two COTS quadruped robots, Ghost Robotics' Vision 60 and Boston Dynamics' Spot, were deployed into a heterogeneous team. A description of some of the challenges faced while integrating the platforms, as well as some experiments in traversing different terrains are provided to give insight into the real-world deployment of legged robots.