ALPHRED, Autonomous Legged Personal Helper Robot with Enhanced Dynamics, Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa), Virginia Tech, Blacksburg , Virgin

Unofficial video of RoMeLa's newest robot ALPHRED2.
ALPHRED2 is a multi-modal locomotion robot that can walk with 4 legs, 2 legs, hop, run, roll, and even use it's limbs for picking up objects or pushing buttons. It is fast (1.5 m/s) and can walk stably on uneven rough terrain. ALPHRED2 is powered by RoMeLa's BEAR (Back-drivable Electromechanical Actuator for Robots) actuators which is compliant and force controlled.

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ALPHRED: Autonomous Legged Personal Helper Robot with Enhanced Dynamics (IROS 2018)

This paper presents a multi-functioning light weight robotic system, the Autonomous Legged Personal Helper Robot
with Enhanced Dynamics (ALPHRED), capable of both locomtion and manipulation. In addition, we extended a 2D zero moment
point (ZMP) trajectory optimization (TO) algorithm to a 3D implementation. As well as adding the acceleration of the
center of mass to the TO cost in order to smooth out the motion of the robot during trajectories with support
polygons that do not intersect. By implementing this versatile TO algorithm on a multi-modal robotic platform we
showed that many different forms of stable locomotion and manipulation were possible including a dynamic 0.7 m/s trot gait.

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