Testudog
Testudog before ICRA 2026 Testudog is the quadruped part of one of UMD's flagship clubs, Robotics @ Maryland (R@M). Basically, we make a fully custom-built robot dog to compete at IEEE's ICRA challenge, where teams from all over the world compete in obstacle course-style challenges. While most of the dogs there are bought from Boston Dynamics or Unitree, we are the 4th university in the world to build and compete with a fully custom dog. The club was born during covid through
Counterspell mk1 Build Blog
Counterspell mk1 at NHRL May Open After building a plastic antweight in the fall, I wanted to move up a notch to building a 3lbs beetle robot. This would allow me to gain more experience with machining and better design practices, as the loads experienced are much higher than in a plastic class. So over winter break I began CADing Counterspell, laying out components, structure, and the grappler system. First CAD iteration of CS The first iteration was very unoptimized but was
Jeff The Land Shark MK1-5 Build Blog
Since this is a bit more stretched out than other projects, I've chosen to do this as a live document instead of a post project summary. Since joining the UMD Leatherbacks combat robotics team in Freshman year, combat has become one of my favorite hobbies. Jeff (the land shark) is my first combat robot, weighing in at 1lbs. While most builders use a "kinetic weapon" (typically a spinning blade or disc), I didn't just want to destroy another bot, I wanted more of a design chal