There is no doubt that the progress made in the field of robotics has been remarkable, so that we can now see robots doing a wide variety of tasks, and even replicating most of the movements made by humans.
In the case of robots with legs, a team of researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University he has developed open source software with the objective of provide greater agility to the movement carried out by this type of robots.
Thus, robots that locomote on four legs require many software components to work perfectly to make this possible.
In that sense, most researchers have to spend a good part of their time develop low-level infrastructure, when what they really should be doing is focusing their attention on the high level behaviors.
This is a situation that Aaron Johnson’s team of investigators has experienced in the past in having to use simple models to get the job donebecause the available software solutions were not open source, nor did they have a modular framework or comprehensive functionality.
That was how Johnson and his team took on the task of creating the Quad SDK, a software stack which constitutes a complete framework for boost agile quadrupedal locomotion.
The design presented by this stack will allow other roboticists to carry out the development process in a simpler way thanks to the implementation of a open source license with which they will have the opportunity to customize it and adjust it to their project.
Another notable aspect of the Quad-SDK is that this It is already programmed to be usedso that the researchers who acquire it do not have the need to implement the tools and infrastructure, so they can concentrate on the behaviors and applications.
Also, the Quad-SDK has been made to be compatible with ROS, the system operative for robots developed as a middlewarethat is, something that is located between the hardware and the software and that makes possible the communication between the components of a system.
Regarding the Quad-SDK, team member and doctoral student Ardalan Tajbakhsh expressed the following:
In order to do anything meaningful in a robot, many components need to work together seamlessly.
So the Quad-SDK provides robot researchers and developers with a framework that allows them to focus their efforts on the main algorithms and not in the software tools and infrastructure.
Although there are software packages With tools that are very useful to solve a component like motion planning, it is necessary to have comprehensive frameworks that include the algorithms and infrastructure necessary to carry out high-quality robotics research.
