LoCoQuad: A Low-Cost Arachnoid Quadruped Robot for Research and Education

TL;DR

LoCoQuad is an affordable, open-source arachnoid quadruped robot designed for research and education, offering high configurability and the lowest hardware cost among similar platforms.

Contribution

It introduces a low-cost, open-source quadruped robot platform with high flexibility, making robotics research and education more accessible.

Findings

Successfully validated the robot through multiple experiments.

Achieved the lowest hardware cost in the state of the art.

All designs and software are openly available for community use.

Abstract

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