Companion Robot Dog
Voice-commanded autonomous navigation with Unitree Go1
Highlights
Initial teleop
First driving the dog around by hand — baseline control before any autonomy.
Navigation, first time working
The first sustained autonomous run — navigation finally holding together end to end.
Home → arm
Autonomous run from home to the arm — waypoints are named after real objects in the demo room.
Arm → board
The next leg, "arm" to "board" — chaining named waypoints into a longer route.
Challenges
A severed leg cable
March 4
New code, a new controller, first day mapping in the lab. I powered the dog on the usual way — short press, long press, wait for the white neck LEDs to flash ready — grabbed the controller to stand it up, and nothing. That was new.
The mobile app (it connects to the dog's onboard Wi-Fi for temps, battery, joints, connection) gave it away fast: the dog believed it was standing, but showed its front-right leg still folded. Checking the wiring from the body to the legs, there it was — a tiny severed cable in the front-right leg. Annoying, and it cost a few days of testing, but as failures go this was the best case: found in minutes, not hours.
Thermal shutdowns and a custom case
mid–late March
During early teleop and mapping the dog kept dropping the connection to the Mac. I shrugged the first one off and restarted — but a "restart" here means walking the dog back to its home coordinates, manually relaunching the Mac, reopening the whole stack. It cut out again. And again.
On the third round I watched temps and memory: with the full stack running, the temperature just climbed until emergency protection cut the system off. The cause made sense — the Mac mini's case had been redesigned and custom-printed to mount on the robot, which threw out whatever cooling the original case provided. So I iterated on yet another print, this time to fit a pair of 5V Noctua PWM fans right on the heatsink. Three redesigns later, the last version was ready in late March — and the temperature problems were gone for good.
Gallery
