Development of A Dynamic Quadruped with Tunable, Compliant Legs

To facilitate the study of how passive leg stiffness influences locomotion dynamics and performance, we have developed an affordable and accessible 400 g quadruped robot driven by tunable compliant laminate legs, whose series and parallel stiffness can be easily adjusted; fabrication only takes 2.5 hours for all four legs. The robot can trot at 0.52 m/s or 4.4 body lengths per second with a 3.2 cost of transport (COT). Through locomotion experiments in both the real world and simulation we demonstrate that legs with different stiffness have an obvious impact on the robot's average speed, COT, and pronking height. When the robot is trotting at 4 Hz in the real world, changing the leg stiffness yields a maximum improvement of 37.1% in speed and 62.0% in COT, showing its great potential for future research on locomotion controller designs and leg stiffness optimizations.