Deploying COTS Legged Robot Platforms into a Heterogeneous Robot Team

TL;DR

This paper explores the deployment of commercial off-the-shelf legged robots within heterogeneous robot teams, highlighting challenges and terrain traversal capabilities through real-world experiments.

Contribution

It provides insights into integrating COTS legged robots into diverse robot teams and evaluates their terrain traversal performance in practical scenarios.

Findings

Successful deployment of Ghost Vision 60 and Boston Dynamics Spot in heterogeneous teams

Identification of integration challenges faced during deployment

Experimental results on terrain traversal capabilities

Abstract

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.