Stanford Doggo Is a Robot Anyone Can Build | News & Opinion

It’s a robot dog that can walk, trot, dance, hop, jump and backflip, and you can build it at home for under $2,600. There’s also a larger version called the Stanford Woofer.

Robots are set to become increasingly useful around the home, but they are pre-built units that perform set tasks. What if you could buy the parts and construct your own robot companion? Students at Stanford University have created exactly that and called it Doggo.

Stanford Doggo was developed by the Extreme Mobility team at the Stanford Student Robotics club. It’s a quadruped robot weighing less than 5kg and capable of dynamic motion allowing it to achieve the highest jump of all quadruped robots, coming in at 1.07 meters. It’s also capable of forward motion traveling at 0.9m/s and its flexible mobility allows the robot to walk, trot, dance, hop, jump, and backflip.

Such an agile little robot sounds expensive, but the students designed Doggo with cost and maintainability in mind. They built it from scratch using off-the-shelf components and decided to share everything on GitHub under an MIT License, which allows anyone to build their own Doggo at home. As for cost, the students state it should come in at under $2,600.

It’s hoped that Doggo can act as a platform for further development to fit specific roles, but with that development happening outside of Stanford.

Patrick Slade, graduate student and Extreme Mobility team mentor, explained, “We’re hoping to provide a baseline system that anyone could build … 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.”

The Doggo development team has already moved on to other projects including a second robot called Stanford Woofer, which is twice the size of Doggo and can carry up to 6kg of load.