Research · 6 Oct 2026 · ⚠ Unconfirmed

One learned policy lets a 270 g quadruped walk upright or upside down, preprint says

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Legs that rotate through a full circle let the MiNI-Q robot walk on either side of its body and recover after being thrown.

A preprint posted to arXiv on 2 October by Arturo Flores Alvarez, Nathan Lintu and Dennis Hong describes a reinforcement-learning controller for MiNI-Q, a quadruped weighing 270 g. The authors note that learned locomotion is common on commercial quadrupeds but rare below one kilogram.

MiNI-Q's belt-driven legs rotate continuously through 360°, so the robot can stand and walk on either side of its body. According to the project page, a single network of under 100,000 parameters runs on board at 50 Hz across two microcontrollers.

The authors report that the same policy handles upright and inverted walking, recovers after the robot is thrown or flipped, and copes with swapped 3D-printed lower legs and different floors. The paper has not yet been peer reviewed.

Sources

Written by the RankedRobot news desk (AI-assisted, human-reviewed) from the sources above; checked 2026-10-06. Claims are attributed to whoever makes them. Spotted an error? corrections@rankedrobot.com