Quadroped morphs into biped robot

This seems to be one of the highlights of IROS 2022 (comes with video demonstration)! However, there is a walker frame around the robot and strings attached to its back. 

From the abstract:

"While quadruped robots usually have good stability and load capacity, bipedal robots offer a higher level of flexibility / adaptability to different tasks and environments. A multi-modal legged robot can take the best of both worlds. In this paper, we show a complete pipeline of design, control, and sim-to-real transfer of a multi-modal legged robot. ... Experimental results show that our proposed algorithms have the best performance in simulation and competitive performance on the real robot with our sim-to-real technique. Overall, our multi-modal robot could successfully switch between biped and quadruped, and walk in both modes."

Multi-Modal Legged Locomotion Framework with Automated Residual Reinforcement Learning

Credits: Synced Global AI Weekly