Hello New Guy!
The Cal Poly Legged Robotics Group is a research group that has spanned several years with minimal overlap in personnel. To streamline the onboarding process, this website has been made entirely for your benefit! We hope that you can learn from the many mistakes we made so you don’t have to make the same ones again. Don’t worry if you feel like things are difficult, we all thought so, but you will get there!
Brief History
2020
BRUCE
The Cal Poly Legged Robotics Group was founded in 2020 with the 2 dof leg senior project. This project wound 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).
2023
Single Leg Hopper
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.
2025
Switch
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
To succeed in CPLRG you will need to learn about some things you have likely never heard before, you will be confused, but it gets pretty awesome. Check out the Learn tab for write ups and resources.
If you are on a team, and I can’t state this enough, become best friends with them. Open communication and helping each other is the greatest asset you have. Share solutions, work together. It may be faster to go alone, but with the breadth of knowledge required teamwork is incredibly important to succeed.
If you are working alone, don’t hesitate to take a look at our members tab. If you have a question, 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.