BerkeleyExpertSystemTechnologiesLab/ultra-spine-hardware

This repository is a 10-year-old academic artifact from a UC Berkeley research lab. With only 1 star and no activity for a decade, it serves strictly as a reference implementation for a specific piece of custom hardware (the ULTRA Spine). The code is highly tied to specific sensors and actuators used in a legacy research prototype, making it nearly impossible to adapt to modern hardware without total rewrite. While the underlying tensegrity research might have been novel in its era, the software lacks any modern moat, community support, or generalizable utility. Frontier labs (OpenAI/Google) are focused on high-level foundation models for general-purpose robotics rather than niche underactuated hardware controllers. The risk of platform domination is low simply because the market for specific tensegrity spines is too small to be a priority, but the project is effectively obsolete in the face of modern robotics frameworks like ROS 2 or contemporary control algorithms.