Evaluation of an Actuated Spine in Agile Quadruped Locomotion
For quadruped robotics researchers, this work provides empirical evidence that an actuated spine improves agility in specific locomotion tasks, though the results are incremental and simulation-based.
This paper empirically investigates the benefits of an actuated spine for learning agile quadruped locomotion in simulation, finding that the spine enables the robot to overcome higher stairs, steeper slopes, higher obstacles, and smaller passages compared to without it.
The spine plays a crucial role in the dynamic locomotion of quadrupedal animals, improving the stability, speed, and efficiency of their gait, especially for fast-paced and highly agile movements. Therefore, the spine is also a promising and natural way to extend the capabilities of quadruped robots. This paper empirically investigates the benefits of an actuated spine for learning agile quadruped locomotion. We evaluate whether the use of the spine brings benefits in terms of high-speed running, climbing stairs, climbing high-angle slopes, hurdling, and crawling scenarios. We conducted an empirical study in MuJoCo simulation using the Silver Badger robot from MAB Robotics with an actuated 1-DOF spine in the sagittal plane. The obtained results show that the use of the spine provides the robot with increased agility and allows it to overcome higher stairs, steeper slopes, higher obstacles, and smaller passages.