Intro
Barkour is a custom-built quadruped with four legs and twelve motor drivers. For the version released on GitHub, Google DeepMind lists a weight of about 14 kg, modified T-Motor AK80-9 motors with 9 Nm nominal and at least 18 Nm peak joint torque and at least 25 rad/s peak joint velocity, an EtherCAT bus typically running at 1 kHz, an onboard Intel NUC11TNBv7 computer and a 60 V lithium-ion battery of about 122 Wh. It comes with a fixed head (Intel RealSense D435i and one OAK camera) or an actuated head with a mouth-like gripper and two OAK cameras.
The robot described in the May 2023 paper was an earlier build of 11.5 kg with T-Motor AK80-6 actuators (12 Nm peak) and control from an off-board workstation. In that paper the robot's best run scored 0.91 and took 20.4 s, about twice the time of a small dog, with a peak speed of 2.3 m/s during the jump. The team reports about 3,600 course attempts across two robots.
Google DeepMind released the hardware design, motor driver firmware based on Pigweed, and MuJoCo simulation models on GitHub, with software under the Apache 2.0 licence and other materials under CC BY-NC 4.0; the repository states it is not an official Google product. Battery runtime, dimensions and the number of robots built have not been published, and there is no commercial version.