Spot Simulator

Summer Fellowship Project - Simulating Spot gRPC Protocols

I was awarded a summer fellowship during the summer after my freshman year (Summer 2020) at UT Austin. As part of this fellowship, I and others in the lab during the summer developed a simulator for the Boston Dynamics Spot.

This was especially needed at the time due to the COVID-19 lockdown; access to physical robots in the lab was limited, so the team needed a tool to enable rapid testing/iteration of software involving the Spot.

The software consists of a library of gRPC services that are implemented in a similar manner to those on the physical Spot. This gRPC server interfaces with a Gazebo simulator to visualize the results of invocations of the gRPC services.

Webviz (left), developed by the AMRL labratory at UT Austin, and the Spot Gazebo simulation (right), developed by my team.

View a video with the details of this project below:

This work was presented at the Undergraduate Research Forum at the University of Texas at Austin.