The new four-legged robot is designed as an autonomous system with versatile and efficient motion, sensing and interaction abilities which is ready-to-program by the ambitioned, beginning robot programmer.
The robot comes with two alternative operating systems (Linux and Windows CE) and enables full control of sensors and actuators. The 15 actuated joints allow for a large variety of gaits and motions. The onboard color vision camera in the head enables active perception of the environment. With its onboard computing facilities and battery supply the robot can be operated fully autonomus. Wireless and tethered LAN communication is possible with the robot.
Moreover, the new robot features an open, modular and reconfigurable hardware and software structure which offers a large variety of research and development opportunities to the advanced robot programmer which can hardly be found in any other robot platform currently available.
The design concept and goals of the new four-legged robot have profited a lot from our more than six years of experience and successful participation (amongst others two championship titles) in the Four-Legged Robot League of RoboCup where the three generations of the Sony AIBO have been used since 1998 as a standard robot platform.