Soft Legged Omnidirectional Tetrapod. The paper introduces a novel, low-cost, and simple design of a flexible-legged quadruped called SLOT (Soft-Legged Omnidirectional Tetrapod), capable of motion in all six degrees of freedom. Unlike rigid-legged robots that require a large number of degrees of freedom to achieve motion in all directions, soft-legged robots like SLOT are inherently more compliant to the operating environment. SLOT achieves crawling, walking, sitting, standing, longitudinal or lateral movement, turning left and right, as well as pitch and roll motions using just four motors. It can be operated wirelessly via Bluetooth by an untrained user. Control over pitch, roll, and height is achieved by regulating leg contractions through PID control. Handcrafted gaits have been developed for crawling, longitudinal, turning, lateral and omnidirectional motion. Additionally, the paper demonstrates PID-based autonomous longitudinal control using an ultrasonic sensor.
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