Doggo is the robot dog developed by Stanford students that can do backflips, jumps and trots

We are living in an age where just having a robot pet is not enough. Robots doing realistic stunts get a lot more attention and it’s reached a point where even students are incorporating these features into robot pets. Students at Stanford Student Robotics Club’s Extreme Mobility team have developed a four-legged robot which they calling the Stanford Doggo. This dog-like robot can perform acrobatic tricks and find its way in a range of terrains. They have released a video which shows Doggo walking on the lawn, doing backflips, trotting, walking on the floor, jumping and more. The students are now working on a larger version of the Doggo, which would be the size of a beagle. [caption id=“attachment_6680821” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Stanford Doggo[/caption] While most robot developers would leave things at that, the Stanford students have gone ahead and made the design of the Doggo, supply list of parts and the code required to run it freely available online on GitHub. Using this anyone interested in robotics can make their own version of Doggo. According to the students, the cost to build a Doggo would be around $3,000. This may sound high for hobbyists, but for robotics researchers, this is a fraction of the tens of thousands of dollars that would otherwise be required to build a robot according to the team. “We had seen these other quadruped robots used in research, but they weren’t something that you could bring into your own lab and use for your own projects,” Nathan Kau, leader of the Extreme Mobility team, said in news release. “We wanted Stanford Doggo to be this open source robot that you could build yourself on a relatively small budget.” The Stanford student team worked on this project for two years and there have been many failed iterations of the quadruped robot till Doggo was successful. Doggo has motors which can sense external forces on the robot and determine accordingly the amount of force and torque each leg requires to maintain a steady gait.

The students are hoping people will build their own applications atop Doggo’s existing feature set. “Say, for example, you wanted to work on search and rescue; you could outfit it with sensors and write code on top of ours that would let it climb rock piles or excavate through caves. Or maybe it’s picking up stuff with an arm or carrying a package,” said Patrick Slade, a graduate student in aeronautics and astronautics and the mentor for Extreme Mobility team.