Testing the Field Capabilities of the Unitree Go-1
Promotional videos are great, but what is the real deal taking a robotic dog to the field?
Published in
8 min readJul 6, 2024
I’m spending the Summer with my son Arthur at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) thanks to a fellowship from the Rady School of Computer Science and Engineering, a partner of the University of Colorado. Along with us, we brought a Unitree Go-1 from the Collaborative AI and Robotics Lab at CU Boulder. RMBL scientists are not only biologists, but many have become drone operators, sensor engineers and data scientists. Our goal is to find out what a commodity robotic dog can add to their set of tools, what it can actually accomplish in the field, and what fundamental research in robotics is needed to enable them.
Here are our key findings from a first deployment:
- The Unitree Go-1 is able to navigate surprisingly rugged terrain.
- The robot does fail. Its legs can entangle with the stems of forbs and shrubs and the robot can easily slip even on flat (!) terrain.
- If the robot fails, it often cannot recover by itself, but needs to be manually disentangled and rebooted.
- The robot itself is absolutely not rugged and susceptive to dust and morning dew, requiring additional engineering…
