When using the Spot robot with your custom software, the most important thing is to setup the network connection between the robot and your computer. The Wifi password of the Spot robot can be found in the battery compartment, or in the admin console of the controller.
The Spot robot server is hosted at 192.168.80.3 on the LAN of the Spot wifi. You can connect to it from an internet browser by going to https://192.168.80.3 and logging in with the admin credentials.
Any program that uses the Spot SDK (either directly or through a ROS wrapper), requires the username, password and correct IP address in order to communicate with the robot. The steps to handle the robot are: establish a connection with Spot, acquire the lease, enable motor power, then Spot will be able to move around.
The key specifications of the Spot robot we have:
- SDK v3.2.0 (as of 15 Feb 2023)
- Spot Explorer (basic model)
- Spot depth cameras (part of the robot, 4m range max)
- Spot Arm
- Spot Core (basic model, CPU only)
- Spot EAP: VLP-16 Velodyne LIDAR (100m range max)
The key advantages of the Spot robot lie in its robust software and control systems.
There is a small computer carried by Spot to run all your software/experiments. This takes Docker containers and runs it on a Linux platform. The correct networking setup is key to ensuring that whatever you run on your laptop continues to run well on the Spot Core. The following services are available at the corresponding addresses:
- [[192.168.80.3:21900|192.168.80.3:21900]] is the Portainer interface
- [[192.168.80.3|192.168.80.3]] is the Spot robot admin interface
- [[192.168.80.3:21443|192.168.80.3:21443]] is the Spot CORE admin interface
The Spot robot can be controlled manually with the included tablet controller.
- Turn on the controller