Evaluation of an Actuated Spine in Agile Quadruped Locomotion

TL;DR

This paper empirically demonstrates that an actuated spine significantly enhances quadruped robot agility, enabling better performance in high-speed running, climbing, hurdling, and crawling tasks in simulation.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical evaluation of an actuated spine's benefits for agile quadruped locomotion in simulation.

Findings

Actuated spine improves high-speed running capabilities.

Spine enables overcoming higher obstacles and steeper slopes.

Increases overall agility and versatility of quadruped robots.

Abstract

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.