Quadruped Robot

A legged robot that walks on four legs, commonly known as a robot dog.

A quadruped robot moves on four legs, commonly with 3 joints per leg, for about 12 degrees of freedom across the whole body. Compared with a biped, it always has multiple legs on the ground, giving it inherently better stability; compared with a wheeled robot, it can cross steps, rubble, and slopes. This made it the first type of legged robot to reach commercial scale, used mainly for industrial inspection, security, surveying, and research and education; adding a robot arm on its back turns it into a mobile manipulator. In recent years, the dominant approach has been to train a locomotion policy with reinforcement learning in simulation, then transfer it to the real robot. Representative examples include Boston Dynamics' Spot, ANYbotics' ANYmal, Unitree's Go2, and DEEP Robotics' Jueying series.

ExampleA locomotion gait trained with reinforcement learning in simulation for a Unitree Go2 can be deployed directly onto the real robot.

Also called

Robot Dog

Related

Legged Locomotion · Boston Dynamics Spot · Unitree Go2 · ANYbotics ANYmal · RL-based Locomotion Control · Sim-to-Real Transfer

Sources

Spot | Boston Dynamics