Building a quadruped robot dog has been a personal goal of mine ever since I started engineering. Over the past months (or even years), I’ve been working on MBF, an open-source quadruped robotics platform designed and built entirely from the ground up using affordable and accessible hardware.
This project has pushed me to learn across multiple engineering domains simultaneously — from mechanical design and fabrication to embedded communication, robotics middleware, and locomotion software architecture.
Everything on the robot was independently designed and integrated by myself, including:
- Mechanical design and CAD
- 3D-printed structural components
- Parts sourcing and assembly
- Electrical wiring and CAN bus communication
- ROS2-based software architecture and control stack
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Current Hardware Highlights:** - Affordable quadruped platform with predominantly 3D-printed components
- GIM6010-8 planetary drive actuators running FOC control over CAN bus
- Design-for-Assembly (DFA) considerations such as standardized screw sizing and modular assembly layout
- Entire robotics stack running on a single Raspberry Pi 4 without additional microcontrollers (selectable inference using either ONNX or Torch C++)
Current Software Stack:
- Custom ROS2 joint impedance controller
- Custom ros2_control hardware interface over CAN bus
- Integration with the CHAMP framework
- Extensible reinforcement learning inference node
- ROS2/Gazebo simulation workflow for sim-to-sim locomotion deployment withe easy switch to real hardware with a simple argument change
One thing this project taught me is that modern robotics is deeply built on open-source collaboration. A lot of the knowledge, frameworks, and tools used throughout MBF came from developers and researchers who chose to make their work publicly accessible.
While I’m proud of the progress made so far, this project is also a reminder that meaningful robotics development has become more accessible than ever. With enough dedication and willingness to learn, it’s genuinely possible for individuals to build complex systems today thanks to the open-source community. What I am doing here today is to merely return that favor back.
The robot is still actively being developed, but seeing the full software stack communicate reliably with custom hardware has been incredibly rewarding so far.
For more info, please check:
github.com/adwng/mbf_ros2
