Legged locomotion over irregular terrains: State of the art of human and robot performance

Legged robotic technologies have moved out of the lab to operate in real environments, characterized by a wide variety of unpredictable irregularities and disturbances, all this in close proximity with humans. Demonstrating the ability of current robots to move robustly and reliably in these conditions is becoming essential to prove their safe operation. Here, we report an in-depth literature review aimed at verifying the existence of common or agreed protocols and metrics to test the performance of legged system in realistic environments. We primarily focused on three types of robotic technologies, i.e., hexapods, quadrupeds and bipeds. We also included a comprehensive overview on human locomotion studies, being it often considered the gold standard for performance, and one of the most important sources of bioinspiration for legged machines. We discovered that very few papers have rigorously studied robotic locomotion under irregular terrain conditions. On the contrary, numerous studies have addressed this problem on human gait, being nonetheless of highly heterogeneous nature in terms of experimental design. This lack of agreed methodology makes it challenging for the community to properly assess, compare and predict the performance of existing legged systems in real environments. On the one hand, this work provides a library of methods, metrics and experimental protocols, with a critical analysis on the limitations of the current approaches and future promising directions. On the other hand, it demonstrates the existence of an important lack of benchmarks in the literature, and the possibility of bridging different disciplines, e.g., the human and robotic, towards the definition of standardized procedure that will boost not only the scientific development of better bioinspired solutions, but also their market uptake

Construcción, simulación y programación de un robot cuadrúpedo multipropósito de código abierto

En este proyecto se pretende modelar, simular y construir un robot cuadrúpedo basado en la plataforma open source Spot Micro (robot inspirado en Spot mini de Boston Dynamics). El objetivo es mediante el estudio de los distintos sistemas actualmente disponibles, desarrollar una plataforma robótica de bajo coste multipropósito, por fases de desarrollo. Se explorará el sistema actual, se corregirán los defectos y finalmente se mejorará dotándolo con la posibilidad de alcanzar cierto nivel de autonomía. Se pretende también generar un programa de gestión que permita el control de sus articulaciones y de los distintos sensores incorporados así como establecer las bases para el entrenamiento de un agente con aprendizaje por refuerzo que sirva como futuro controlador del robot vía teleoperación o control manual