From Leash To Locomotion: CARA The Robotic Dog

July 13, 2025 by Matt Varian 9 Comments

Normally when you hear the words “rope” and “dog” in the same sentence, you think about a dog on a leash, but in this robot dog, the rope is what makes it move, not what stops it from going too far. [Aaed Musa]’s latest project is CARA, a robotic dog made mostly of 3D printed parts, with brushless motors and ropes used to tie the motors and legs together.

In a previous post, we covered [Aaed Musa]’s use of rope as a mechanism to make capstan drives, enabling high torque and little to no backlash. Taking that gearbox design, tweaking it a bit, and using three motors, he was able to make a leg capable of moving in all three axes. He had to do a good deal of inverse kinematics math to get the leg moving around as desired; once he had the motion of a step defined, it was time to build the rest of the dog.

CARA is made primarily of 3D printed parts, with several carbon fiber tubes running its length for rigidity. The legs are all free to move not only forward and back but side to side some, as in a real dog. He uses 12 large brushless motors, as they provide the torque needed, and ODrive S1 motor controllers to control each one, controlled over CAN by a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller. There is also a small BNO086 IMU to sense CARA’s position relative to gravity, and a 24V cordless tool battery powers everything.

Once assembled, there was some more tuning of what type of motion CARA’s legs take while walking. There were a few tweaks to the printed parts to address some structural issues, and then a good deal more inverse kinematics math to make full use of the IMU, allowing CARA to handle inclines and make a much more natural movement style. [Aaed Musa] does a great job explaining his approach on his site as well as in the video below; we’re looking forward to seeing his future projects!

CARA isn’t alone on this site—be sure to check out the other robot dogs we’ve featured here.

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Meet Cucumber, The Robot Dog

June 27, 2025 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Robots can look like all sorts of things, but they’re often more fun if you make them look like some kind of charming animal. That’s precisely what [Ananya], [Laurence] and [Shao] did when they built Cucumber the Robot Dog for their final project in the ECE 4760 class.

Cucumber is controllable over WiFi, which was simple enough to implement by virtue of the fact that it’s based around the Raspberry Pi Pico W. With its custom 3D-printed dog-like body, it’s able to move around on its four wheels driven by DC gear motors, and it can flex its limbs thanks to servos in its various joints. It’s able to follow someone with some autonomy thanks to its ultrasonic sensors, while it can also be driven around manually if so desired. To give it more animal qualities, it can also be posed, or commanded to bark, howl, or growl, with commands issued remotely via a web interface.

The level of sophistication is largely on the level of the robot dogs that were so popular in the early 2000s. One suspects it could be pretty decent at playing soccer, too, with the right hands behind the controls. Video after the break.

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Hackaday Links: June 8, 2025

June 8, 2025 by Dan Maloney 20 Comments

When purchasing high-end gear, it’s not uncommon for manufacturers to include a little swag in the box. It makes the customer feel a bit better about the amount of money that just left their wallet, and it’s a great way for the manufacturer to build some brand loyalty and perhaps even get their logo out into the public. What’s not expected, though, is for the swag to be the only thing in the box. That’s what a Redditor reported after a recent purchase of an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090, a GPU that lists for $1,999 but is so in-demand that it’s unobtainium at anything south of $2,600. When the factory-sealed box was opened, the Redditor found it stuffed with two cheap backpacks instead of the card. To add insult to injury, the bags didn’t even sport an Nvidia logo.

The purchase was made at a Micro Center in Santa Clara, California, and an investigation by the store revealed 31 other cards had been similarly tampered with, although no word on what they contained in lieu of the intended hardware. The fact that the boxes were apparently sealed at the factory with authentic anti-tamper tape seems to suggest the substitutions happened very high in the supply chain, possibly even at the end of the assembly line. It’s a little hard to imagine how a factory worker was able to smuggle 32 high-end graphics cards out of the building, so maybe the crime occurred lower down in the supply chain by someone with access to factory seals. Either way, the thief or thieves ended up with almost $100,000 worth of hardware, and with that kind of incentive, this kind of thing will likely happen again. Keep your wits about you when you make a purchase like this.

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TOPS, The DIY Robot Dog, Has Great Moves

March 15, 2024 by Donald Papp 6 Comments

We love [Aaed Musa]’s TOPS (Traverser of Planar Surfaces) which is a robot dog with custom-made actuators. The DIY is very strong with this project, and the 3D-printed parts alone took a whopping three weeks to print!

There’s additional detail on the electronics and design of TOPS in the build log of the project’s Hackaday.io page, so check it out because there are all sorts of nice design details, like the feet being cast with a silicone outer layer for better traction. We’ve previously covered [Aaed]’s DIY robotic actuator design which we’re delighted to see is put to excellent use in the finished robot.

Of course, a robot’s hardware and physical design is only part of the battle. In fact, [Aaed] says the software side of things was probably the biggest overall challenge. It takes a lot of work to make walking happen, and the process has in fact been a huge learning experience. [Aaed] already has plenty of ideas for a potential TOPS V2.

[Aaed]’s website has video tours of all stages of design and construction of TOPS, and there’s a GitHub repository for all the design details. To see it all in action, check out the short video rounding up the finished robot, embedded here just under the page break.

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DingoQuadruped Is A Cheap Canine-Like Robot

June 21, 2023 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

Robot humanoids are cool, but also a bit hard to make work as they only have two legs to stand on. Four-legged robots can be a bit more approachable. The Dingo Quadruped aims to be just such an open-source platform for teaching and experimentation purposes.

The robot is based on the Stanford Pupper, a robot platform we’ve discussed previously. It bears a design not dissimilar from the popular Spot robot from Boston Dynamics. Where Spot costs tens of thousands of dollars, though, Dingo is far cheaper, intended for cheap production by students and researchers for less than $1,500.

The robot weighs around 3 kg, and is approximately the size of a shoebox. Control over the robot is via a wireless game controller. Each leg uses three high-torque servo motors, which are elegantly placed to reduce the inertia of the leg itself. A Raspberry Pi runs the show, with an Arduino Nano also onboard for interfacing analog sensors or additional hardware. The chassis itself has a highly modular design, with a focus on making it easy to add additional hardware.

If you want to get started experimenting with quadruped robots, the Dingo might just be the perfect platform for you. Video after the break.

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2022 FPV Contest: The LOTP Robot Dog

December 21, 2022 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

When you think of first person view (FPV) vehicles, aircraft might be what first comes to mind. However, [Limenitis Reducta] has brought a robot dog into the world, and plans to equip it for some FPV adventures.

LOTP pictured with various equippable modules.

The robot dog itself goes by the name of LOTP, for unspecified reasons, and was designed from the ground up in Fusion 360. A Teensy 3.5 is charged with running the show, managing control inputs and outputting the requisite instructions to the motor controllers to manage the walk cycle. Movement are issued via a custom RC controller. Thanks to an onboard IMU, the robotic platform is able to walk effectively and maintain its balance even on a sloping or moving platform.

[Limenitis] has built the robot with a modular platform to support different duties. Equitable modules include a sensor for detecting dangerous gases, a drone launching platform, and a lidar module. There’s also a provision for a camera which sends live video to the remote controller. [Limenitis] has that implemented with what appears to be a regular drone FPV camera, a straightforward way to get the job done.

It’s a fun build that looks ready to scamper around on adventures outside. Doing so with an FPV camera certainly looks fun, and we’ve seen similar gear equipped on other robot dogs, too.

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Robot Dog Has Animal Magnetism

December 18, 2022 by Al Williams 7 Comments

Robot “dogs” are all the rage lately, but you probably haven’t seen one that can climb up a wall. Researchers in Korea have made one that can, assuming the wall is made out of a metal that a magnet can stick to at least. The robot, MARVEL or magnetically adhesive robot for versatile and expeditious locomotion, might be pressing its luck on acronyms, but it is pretty agile as you can see in the video below. Tests showed the robot walking on walls and ceilings. It can cross gaps and obstacles and can even handle a curved storage tank with paint and rust.

The robot weighs 8 kilograms (17.6 pounds), can carry 2 – 3 kg of payload, and operates without a tether. Each foot contains both an electropermanent magnet and magnetorheological elastomers. If you haven’t seen them before, an electropermanent magnet, or EPM, is a magnet that can be turned on or off electronically. The elastomer is a polymer containing ferromagnetic particles that can alter the material’s properties in response to a magnetic field.

EPMs have two parts. One part is a simple permanent magnet. The other is a soft core easily magnetized by a surrounding coil. If you magnetize the soft core to oppose the permanent magnet, the fields cancel out, effectively turning off the magnet. If you magnetize it the other way, it reinforces the field.

This is better than an electromagnet in this application because turning the magnet on or off only requires a brief pulse. If you want your robot to hang out on the ceiling with Spider Man indefinitely, you don’t have to worry about draining your batteries while keeping an electromagnet engaged.

Overall, an interesting robot. Most wall-climbing robots we’ve seen are pretty lightweight. We don’t see nearly as many that can have the feeling of clinging to the ceiling.

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