toby

a self-balancing wheeled-leg robot with onboard vision, a ground station and a mission-control dashboard.

toby is a self-balancing wheeled-leg robot, built on the open micro wheeled-leg design by mushibo. an esp32 balances and drives, a raspberry pi 5 with a time-of-flight camera handles perception and autonomy, and a laptop ground station stores everything toby finds and serves a mission-control dashboard.

how it fits together

the esp32 owns the fast loop: balance, motors, legs, and a watchdog with an e-stop latch. the pi owns the slow one: a depth node that maps hazards, a world model, an autonomy executor and a safety supervisor. every command is authenticated and in sequence, and losing the link soft-stops the robot within 200 ms.

the ground station is mission control: a sqlite store, a map of where toby has been and what it saw, a bounded planner that proposes missions for an operator to approve, and a react dashboard. the planner can suggest routes. it cannot set speeds or gains.

where it stands

balance is tuned in mujoco before any hardware power-up. the simulator covers pushes, bumps, ramps, steps and height changes, plus terrain-training runs. the software is integrated and tested locally and in simulation. nothing has been validated on the physical robot yet, and this page will say so until it has.