MiNI-Q: A Miniature, Wire-Free Quadruped with Unbounded, Independently Actuated Leg Joints
This addresses hardware constraints for researchers and developers in robotics, offering an incremental improvement over previous designs with enhanced assembly reliability.
The paper tackles the problem of physical joint limits in legged robots by introducing MiNI-Q, a miniature, wire-free quadruped with unbounded, independently actuated leg joints, achieving speeds up to 0.46 m/s and capabilities like stair climbing and backflipping.
Physical joint limits are common in legged robots and can restrict workspace, constrain gait design, and increase the risk of hardware damage. This paper introduces MiNI-Q^2, a miniature, wire-free quadruped robot with independently actuated, mechanically unbounded 2-DOF leg joints. We present the mechanical design, kinematic analysis, and experimental validation of the proposed robot. The leg mechanism enables both oscillatory gaits and rotary locomotion while allowing the robot to fold to a minimum height of 2.5 cm. Experimentally, MiNI-Q achieves speeds up to 0.46 m/s and demonstrates low-clearance crawling, stair climbing, inverted locomotion, jumping, and backflipping. The wire-free architecture extends our previous Q8bot design, improving assembly reliability at miniature scale. All mechanical and electrical design files are released open source to support reproducibility and further research.