Stanford Pupper: A Low-Cost Agile Quadruped Robot for Benchmarking and Education
This provides an accessible benchmark platform for legged robotics researchers and educators, though it is incremental in focusing on reproducibility and benchmarking rather than novel control methods.
The authors tackled the need for a low-cost, reproducible benchmark platform in legged robotics by developing Stanford Pupper, a quadruped robot that can be built in under 8 hours for under $2000, and introduced benchmarks like Sprint and Scramble to test dynamic locomotion and terrain robustness.
We present Stanford Pupper, an easily-replicated open source quadruped robot designed specifically as a benchmark platform for legged robotics research. The robot features torque-controllable brushless motors with high specific power that enable testing of impedance and torque-based machine learning and optimization control approaches. Pupper can be built from the ground up in under 8 hours for a total cost under $2000, with all components either easily purchased or 3D printed. To rigorously compare control approaches, we introduce two benchmarks, Sprint and Scramble with a leader board maintained by Stanford Student Robotics. These benchmarks test high-speed dynamic locomotion capability, and robustness to unstructured terrain. We provide a reference controller with dynamic, omnidirectional gaits that serves as a baseline for comparison. Reproducibility is demonstrated across multiple institutions with robots made independently. All material is available at https://stanfordstudentrobotics.org/quadruped-benchmark.