Enabling Navigation and Mission-Based Control on a Low-Cost Unitree Go1 Air Quadrupedal Robot

Quadrupedal robots are now not just prototypes as they were a decade ago. This field now focuses on finding new application areas for robots rather than solving pure locomotion problems. Although the price of quadrupedal robots has decreased significantly during the last decade, it is still relatively high and can be considered as one of the limiting factors for research, especially for multi-agent scenarios involving multiple robots. This paper proposes a simple and easily reproducible approach to integrating the cheapest robot from the Unitree Go1 series with controllers running the ArduPilot firmware without disassembling the robot itself or modifying its hardware. Experimental studies show that the average latency introduced by the proposed control method over Wi-Fi is 206.7 ms, and its standard deviation is below 53 ms, which is suitable for following the mission route using the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). At the same time, control using Ethernet reduces mean latency down to 78.3 ms and provides additional functionality (e.g., the ability to configure step height). Finally, in the range of standard Go1 speeds, both proposed control interfaces, based on Wi-Fi and Ethernet, are suitable for most practical indoor and outdoor tasks.