Stepping into the untested waters that Boston Robotics rules for the moment; Chinese consumer tech giant Xiaomi has launched a bio-inspired quadruped robot – CyberDog. The robotic dog was launched alongside the company’s new Mix 4 smartphone, doing backflips and handshakes on the stage. This is Xiaomi’s first foray into quadruped robotics and it’s an open source design whose purpose remains undefined at this moment.
The CyberDog software, as said, is open source. The idea from Xiaomi is to build a community of robotics developers who can then play around and share activities and modules for the CyberDog to try and execute.
The robotic pet of sorts, this new quadrupedal robot dog, will respond to voice commands to follow his human or perform tasks on order. For its abilities, the CyberDog is powered by an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX chipset and features 11 sensors over its body to manage instant movements and activities.
Xiaomi has employed some of its camera and sensors deployed in the smartphone for the goodness of the little puppy. For instance, there is an Intel RealSense D450 Depth camera to which Xiaomi has added ultra-wide fisheye lenses, touch sensors, GPS and six microphones. These together allow the CyberDog to better negotiate its environment by creating navigation maps in real time to avoiding obstacles and reach the desired destination.
The robotic dog features three Type-C ports and an HDMI port for developers to use for programming the robot. CyberDog comes packed with Xiaomi’s in-house servo motor that provide the little guy the ability to walk, run, jump. It can even execute backflips and is rated to carry up to 3kg payload, if need be.
According to Xiaomi, only 1,000 units of the CyberDog will be released initially for members of “Xiaomi Open Source Community” to play around with. The robot will walk around on all fours for a very affordable $1,550.
