mike4921

This is the perfect opportunity to pitch my own version of this robot! Implemented in a ROS framework, with a working walking gait, and some decent documentation: https://github.com/mike4192/spotMicro

I stumbled on nicrusso7's github page as I was doing my own initial research. I initially, naively, thought I could easily expand on his work and reinforcement learn my way to a working walking gait pretty quickly. However once I got a feel for the hardware and it's performance limits and the play in the system, I realized differences between the simulated model and real life would be significant, and would make debugging the translation from simulation to real life difficult. Also I'm teaching myself software development and reinforcement learning was another whole thing to learn.

So instead I took a different approach and implemented a more "conventional" gait, with inspiration and examples from other similar projects.

I've abandoned reinforcement learning for now, as I'm more interested in implementing mapping and motion planning going forward. But one day I'd like to revisit it and see how the pipeline for ML to real implementation works for something like this low level control.

Simulink, and specifically stateflow, is commonly used in the aerospace industry to graphically create state machines that can be autocoded into high performance C or C++ code. I use simulink and stateflow everyday to create flight control software. I feel like more software engineers should learn how to use graphical coding tools, as IMO it's so much easier to represent complex state machines graphically.

It's a shame that Mathworks is essentially the only game in town though, and their software licenses are fairly expensive.

I love it! For all the bad things bitcoin has brought, I have to say it makes me feel like I'm living in a cyberpunk novel! Snow Crash...Neuromancer.... I think people are focusing on all the negatives and overlooking all the fascinating aspects of whats going on. The internet has basically spontaneously created an interesting and suspicious technology. I think it's really only been possible thanks to the increasingly effective and available means of energy production, such that almost a consumer commodity.

Neal Stephenson, if you're reading this, this would make an amazing sci-fi novel.