Last Updated: April 6, 2026

Ever since transferring into Mechatronics Engineering, I've been exposed to a lot of cool technologies, including 3D printing, ROS2 (see my blog post), and I've been tinkering frequently with my Arduino!

Inspired by my mentor Lokesh Patel, I wanted to make a big project to learn the skills that I might have missed out on in the first year of the program. I also wanted to make something really cool that could teach me about robotics physics, ros2, and mechanical design in one.

I've always wanted to have a dog, and I fondly remember the first time I watched Michael Reeves' videos featuring Spot, the Quadruped from Boston Dynamics. This inspired me to take a swing at making my own Spot. From now on, it will be referred to as QB, short for Q-Bot, which is once again short for Quadruped Bot. Creative, I know. Maybe one day I will give it a better name. Like Gary. (Shoutout if you get the Robot 4 reference)

Today is April 5th, 2026. I got super bored of studying for exams, so instead, I got excited and started planning out a roadmap for how I'm going to tackle this engineering problem. I am still focusing on exams, but I am really excited to get building after exams.

For the legs, I have decided on 3 DOF. With 4 legs, this means I will need 12 Servo Motors. I'll be using a Bambu Labs P1S for 3D printing all of the robot's parts. The ultimate goal of this project is to allow the robot to navigate indoor spaces and small outdoor spaces with reactive obstacle avoidance and local waypoint movement. This will utilize 2D LiDAR SLAM and a front-facing camera. I admit this is looking pretty far into the future, but it's good to have a final goal in mind. I'll be using PLA for the prototyping prints to figure out the inverse kinematics and forwards/backwards walking protocols, and I'll be using ABS for the final structural parts, because I hear it's better structurally. I don't expect this robot to be massive, like Spot. Rather, I expect it to be around the size of my compact mini-itx PC.