Building a Custom Quadruped Robot

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Hello Team,

I wanted to ask for your advice on building a custom quadruped robot. We already have the hardware ready (Robot dog framework with 3 motor legs), but I’ve been struggling to make it work with the MIT Mini Cheetah framework.

I also found the ROS Champ platform, which seems like it could help. Have you or your team used ROS Champ before?

I’d really appreciate your opinion on this and any tips you might have for working with the MIT Cheetah framework.

Thank you in advance

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Dear @Vishnu,

We have worked with CHAMP. It is ok but long-term, you may want to move into Isaac gym as it will create a more robust controller for the quadrupeds.

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Hello @Sohail

Thank you for your reply.

My actual goal is to make the robot alive. Right now we have the hardware ready.
Are you telling Isaac gym can be used for this purpose or it’s for further reinforcement learning?

As I understand it, CHAMP operates with ROS nodes to handle the dynamic model, while a middle layer subscribes to these nodes to communicate with the actuators. This includes sending data to the actuators and receiving encoder values in return.

With MIT Mini cheetah, I find it’s similar [instead of ROS, they have c++ model]. I am also able to get torque, pos value from MIT, but failed to understand the expected output.

Could you please give your comment on this?
My current plan is to proceed with Champ as I am unable to make progress with MIT.

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Hello @Sohail

Could you tell me how did you interface the Champ ROS nodes to the actual hardware?
Did you use ros controllers or directly send values to actuator?

Thank you in advance,
Vishnu

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We used and modified the CHAMP hardware controllers to work with the quadruped robot.