Stanford Pupper

A four-legged robot for research and education

Overview

Pupper is a 2kg open source robot designed for both research and education. It uses high power, torque-controllable actuators which makes it perfect for testing novel control approaches, but at the same time, it’s small, easy to build, and inexpensive.

If you’d like to build Stanford Pupper, please checkout our Course Website, specifically the Sourcing Course Material page. We’re constantly updating it, so be sure to check frequently. The project page hosts the latest build videos and instructions, and has additional documentation on setting up the software and running the robot.

Benchmark: Sprint

For this benchmark task, the robot traverses a straight 5 meter course as quickly as possible, with the score being the average speed of the robot. This is a basic task designed to test the performance capability of the controller.

Benchmark: Scramble

This is a more challenging task that requires the robot to traverse a set of tall obstacles. Many of the common assumptions, like flat ground, are put to the test here. See a common setup at right.

Code

The code is split across three repositories:

Course

In collaboration with Hands-On Robotics and Google Brain, Stanford Student Robotics has developed a quarter-long hands on course centered around understanding, building, and coding legged robots. You can access the open courseware here! https://pupper-independent-study.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. Lectures and lab materials are completely free and available for you to complete the course at your own pace. So far, students at Stanford, MIT, Brandeis, Washington University, University of Washington, WPI, Foothill College, and more have taken the course. In summer of 2022, Abdul Omria is piloting the course in Turkey and Lebanon so stay tuned for translated materials.