Have you seen a new robot dog roaming around campus and wondered who he is?

That’s BenBen! He’s the VAR Lab’s Unitree Go2 Pro.

Our Director Chris Shelton took him out for a walk around campus to meet his new friend Millie!

To our students, BenBen is more than a piece of technology—he’s a tool for testing ideas, solving problems, and turning imagination into real projects.

Our student researchers are finding creative ways to put BenBen to work:
• Producing immersive videos that make distant or hard-to-reach places accessible
• Designing and 3D-printing custom attachments to make the robot more versatile
• Expanding the LiDAR capabilities to create persistent, large scale scans of large plots of land, buildings, or room models.

From classroom concepts to field trials, innovation at the VAR Lab is built step by step, and BenBen is helping lead the way.