AI-powered dog robots, built by students

CS123 is an introduction level robotic class only for undergrads. This is a very hands-on class. We'll have students build a robot from scratch. The platform that we use is called Popper. It's a quadruped. It has full capability of locomotion. It can navigate pretty well. There are a few directions students like to approach. One is a social robot. Popper looks so cute. Immediately you can think of a Popper being a companion robot for children, for elderly. Most students can build Popper from scratch from parts within the first four weeks of the class. And then after that, they can start teaching different skills. Students also learn basic kinematics and also machine learning, reinforcement learning, all the way to large language model. How do you get Popper to interact with you with some intelligence? You need to be able to see the world. You need to be able to reason. There's one team that put an arm on the top of the Popper so that Popper can actually fetch things. And then there's another team that put kind of like a water jet on Popper. They want to turn Popper into a firefighter. They get to experience the challenges of doing live demo in front of a big crowd. We invite a lot of roboticists, famous roboticists in the Bay Area, like from Google DeepMind, from NVIDIA. All our students this year did very well. This class is an introduction level class, so I hope this is not the end. Our goal is to inspire students to continue to take more advanced classes. There are plenty of opportunities to advance in robotics, and this is just the beginning.