ABSTRACT
Development and prototyping of robotic systems requires the involvement of many people and many hours of design, development, and cooperation; significant time and effort overhead is required for evaluating conceptual ideas in design, control and technology, and for bringing them fast into reality for testing. Based on the important advances of the last decade in hardware and software, a simple and low-cost framework and its underlying ideas are presented, with steps that aim at accelerating robotics research work in academia and industry. The framework’s functionality is validated and illustrated by two application examples concerning the control systems of a single-legged hopping robot and an instrumented treadmill. The software required to conduct the same experiments is provided, with the intention to help the reader reuse it in similar applications.
