Additively Manufactured Open-Source Quadruped Robots for Multi-Robot SLAM Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces Squeaky, an affordable open-source quadruped robot designed for multi-robot SLAM research, enabling collaborative mapping and localization in complex environments.

Contribution

The work presents a novel, cost-effective quadruped robot platform with adaptable hardware and software for multi-robot SLAM applications, available as open-source.

Findings

Successfully demonstrated multi-robot SLAM with Squeaky

Designed hardware for easy adaptation and scalability

Enabled collaborative environment mapping

Abstract

This work presents the design and development of the quadruped robot Squeaky to be used as a research and learning platform for single and multi-SLAM robotics, computer vision, and reinforcement learning. Affordable robots are becoming necessary when expanding from single to multi-robot applications, as the cost can increase exponentially as fleet size increases. SLAM is essential for a robot to perceive and localize within its environment to perform applications such as cave exploration, disaster assistance, and remote inspection. For improved efficiency, a fleet of robots can be employed to combine maps for multi-robot SLAM. Squeaky is an affordable quadrupedal robot, designed to have easily adaptable hardware and software, capable of creating a merged map under a shared network from multiple robots, and available open-source for the benefit of the research community.