On April 7, 2022, a research team from Beijing Institute of Technology released an intelligent rat-like robot called SQuRo (Small-sized Quadruped Robotic rat).SQuRo is able to perform five motion modes, including squat-to-stand, walking, crawling, turning, and fall recovery.
This robot has been developed to address the real problem of difficult detection in narrow spaces, and has developed an intelligent bionic legged robot rat with small size, flexibility, and multidimensional perception, which has already gained initial applications in agricultural inspection and pipeline detection, and will serve in post-disaster search and rescue in the future.
By capturing a decent representation of an actual rat (rattus norvegicus), the group developed a small-sized quadruped robotic rat (SQuRo), which includes four limbs and one flexible spine. On the basis of the extracted key movement joints, SQuRo was subtly designed with a relatively elongated slim body (aspect ratio: 3.42) and smaller weight (220 g) ，and it can carry up to 200 grams of cargo, such as cameras or other sensors.
The results obtained through a series of experimental tests reveal that SQuRo achieves a superior motion performance compared with existing state-of-the-art small-sized quadruped robots. Remarkably, SQuRo has an extremely small turning radius (0.48 BL) ， and it can recover from falls.