Animal behaviors and the
biological mechanisms underpinning them are among the greatest sources of
inspiration for robotics studies. Over the past decade or so, countless
research teams at universities and companies worldwide have been trying to
develop robots that recreate the behaviour or structure of specific animal
species. One of the latest attempts was made researchers at the University of
Zaragoza, who recently developed a quadruped robot called LoCoQuad inspired by
arachnoids. Their goal was to develop a low-cost robotic platform that could be
used as a benchmark to train and evaluate reinforcement learning (RL)
algorithms.
LoCoQuad, the arachnoid-inspired,
four-legged robotic platform has remarkably low hardware costs (ranging between
$150 and $165 USD), and could thus easily be fabricated on a large scale. While
it may not be the most efficient quadruped robot developed up to date, its low
production cost, the fact that it is open-source, highly configurable and user
friendly, make it a highly promising platform for both research and education. Researchers
found that the robot could complete a variety of basic tasks, suggesting that
it is a great platform to test reinforcement learning and other
machine-learning algorithms.
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