The Cal Poly Legged Robotics Group is a research group that has spanned several years with minimal overlap in personnel. With this website, we intend to streamline the onboarding process. We hope that you can learn from our (many) mistakes, and can instead spend your time making progress.
Brief History
BRUCE
2020-2021 The Cal Poly Legged Robotics Group was founded in 2020 with the 2 DOF leg senior project. This project would up working so quickly they decided to make a body for the legs to fit on. This project then became BRUCE (Bounding Robot Utilizing Controls Engineering).
Single Leg Hopper
2023-2024 Work on the leg continued with the planarizer test stand which was upgraded in early 2023 for John Bennett’s Masters Thesis. This project endeavored to write a classical controller for single leg hopping using the MATLAB Speedgoat.
In 2023 work started on Switch.
Switch
2023- With the rising popularity of Machine Learning and new exciting hardware, the Switch project endeavored to upgrade BRUCE to a Reinforcement Learning Platform. New hardware including the NVIDIA Jetson would be placed on board for a powerful mobile robotics platform.
How to Succeed
There’s a lot to learn - check out the learn tab for some quick tutorials on basic systems used by the group.
If you are on a team, become best friends with them. Perio. Open communication and helping each other is the greatest asset you have. Share solutions, and work together. It may be faster to go alone, but when the breadth of knowledge required teamwork is incredibly important to succeed. If nothing else, it’ll keep you sane during long nights in the lab.
If you are working alone, don’t worry - take a look at our members tab. If you have a question or need to be set straight, ask a previous member a question!
Finally, as you start on your project, keep time in mind and keep everything as simple as you can. The nature of this work is you will have approximately a year to work on your project. Get started early, and get your hands on hardware as fast as you can.