CHANNELS

Aerospace

Automotive

Automated & Autonomous Vehicles

Battery & Electrification Technology

Defense

Drone TV

Electronics

Manufacturing & Prototyping

Materials

Medical

Motion Control

RF & Microwave Technology

Robotics & Automation

Sensors & IoT

Test & Measurement

Aerospace
Automotive
Automated & Autonomous Vehicles
Battery & Electrification Technology
Defense
Drone TV
Electronics
Manufacturing & Prototyping
Materials
Medical
Motion Control
RF & Microwave Technology
Robotics & Automation
Sensors & IoT
Test & Measurement
Aerospace & Defense
Search Results

Build Your Own 'Doggo': Low-Cost Robot Jumps, Flips, and Trots

The Stanford Student Robotics club’s "Extreme Mobility" team at Stanford University  has developed a four-legged robot that performs acrobatic tricks, traverses challenging terrain, and is fully reproducible. Anyone who wants their own version of the "Doggo" robot can find comprehensive plans, code, and a supply list freely available online here  . The team estimates the cost of Doggo at less than $3,000. The highly agile robot is designed to provide an accessible platform for legged robot research; weighing in at a little less than 5kg, Doggo is easy and safe to develop on.

Topics:
Automation Manufacturing & Prototyping Motion Control Robotics Software

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING] Stanford Doggo is a new quadruped robot that we built. We designed it to be inexpensive, open-source, but also have high performance. Each of the legs are four-bar linkages that are driven by a belt pulley system. He can walk. He can trot. He can do backflips.

    00:00:19 When we run Doggo, there's usually two people in control. One person is usually holding the E-stop-- so the E-stop is a switch that when you press it, it'll turn the robot off, so this is, kind of, a safety measure-- and the second person is on the computer, and then they're the person giving the robot its different commands. It's transmitted over our wireless link to the robot,

    00:00:47 for instance, trot at this speed, jump with this height. We carefully designed it so that it's super light and very power dense so it can accomplish very dynamic tasks. It can tell when it's applying forces to the ground, and also, it's able to then adjust itself very quickly to changing scenarios. The compliant behavior of Stanford Doggo means that each leg is, kind of, acting as a virtual spring, and there's no springs in the robot though. It's all done in software.

    00:01:16 The motors of the robot are operating at 8,000 times a second where they're re-computing the forces that the legs need to apply to make sure that they're able to overcome disturbances and track the trajectories. It's been a lot of trial and error. For instance, we never made a simulated model of this robot, so everything that we tried was in real life, and it was part of the fun of the project, honestly. When we first put the full robot on the ground,

    00:01:40 it, kind of, looked like a toddler who really didn't know how to walk at all, but it was moving. It was moving, and we were really excited. The code for all of the legs and for all of the abilities that it has, we have online. So anyone who wanted to build Stanford Doggo could do so at a relatively small cost. We had seen these other quadruped robots used in research, but they weren't something that you could bring into your own lab

    00:02:05 and use for your own research. They were, kind of, isolated in the labs that they were developed in. We're basically having this fundamental system that then people can piece on to accomplish whatever tasks they're interested in. Maybe it's picking stuff by putting an arm on the robot or carrying a package. What's the next generation of this that would be more capable and more

    00:02:22 useful from what we've learned? For more, please visit us at Stanford.edu.