NathanKau

Martin's robot was definitely an inspiration. As far as I know he was the first one to figure out how to make cheap, nonbackdrivable servo motors work for dynamic quadruped movement. Wouldn't have started the project without seeing his videos.

We're actually working with some people who are interested in selling the kits as a side project. Stay tuned. With double the BOM cost, we'd use torque-controllable servos. We're testing out the DJI M2006 right now.

Great feedback! Will definitely incorporate those features into future revisions.

There's blackbird, but not sure of its current status. https://hackaday.io/project/160882-blackbird-bipedal-robot

We've found you can actually do a lot with dumb servos and orientation feedback and get visually similar results to Spot. For instance, we get hopping, trotting, strafing, turning + strafing, walking. What it can't do is prancing or a flying trot. But we think it's totally worth it since a good-enough servo is around $20, while similarly sized torque-controllable servo (excluding dynamixels, which don't actually have torque control), runs about $400 each. DJI did actually come out recently with their M3508 and M2006 which we're starting to play with, and we think we can build a torque-controllable pupper for about $1.5k.

The main limitation I think for servo robots with kinematic (position-control) controllers is speed. We're moving around 0.8m/s max, while the new Unitree A1 is something like 3.5m/s.

Hey all, my group in Stanford Student Robotics made Pupper. Happy to answer any questions!

Just for fun I uploaded the top and bottom body panel DXFs to jlcpcb and they're only about $2 each. That's compared to about $30 to have them cut out of carbon fiber, and of course you don't get to put circuity like your power distribution on it for free.

You can buy the CLS6336HV servos from JX-Servo directly for about $25 each. Usually a much better deal than on Aliexpress, Banggood etc and it's pretty easy to do. The $600 price point though assumes you have a number of things already like a RPi, lipo charger, or PS4 controller.

The SpotMicroAI project has a great community on its Slack, but the project is a bit more in its infancy than Pupper. For instance, spot micro doesn't have the software right now to make it walk quickly or trot. Pupper is at a v1.0 stage with software and build instructions already complete, but it's potentially more expensive to build than spot micro.

You can buy the carbon fiber parts here! https://great3d.com/stanford-pupper-robot-carbon-fiber-parts...