Palm-sized DIY AI Robot Dog Petoi Bittle oozes STEM in the fun, intriguing, and alarmingly adept quadruped.
In one day OpenCat, the Creator, received $50K for Petoi Bittle on Kickstarter.
Unlike most of the open source Pi-powered bots out there, this little guy looks like one of the big Ray Bradbury Firemen dog-bots patrolling the woods of MIT and the DARPA lab.
It walks on four legs!
And it does so in a dexterous fashion that is extremely impressive, in particular considering the motor, battery and robotics are all held in a Chihuahua-sized shell (20cm x 11cm x 11cm are the dimensions).
As if the similarities in appearance and movement were not enough, Petoi Bittle can also carry almost twice its own weight (450 grams to be exact).
There are still Early Bird kits available giving you a full-on robot Petoi for $195!
That is remarkable considering the capabilities.
Petoi has a custom Arduino board that is heavily modded called a NyBoard V1.
The chip of the Arduino Uno board was customized incorporate the use of sophisticated motions and drive at least 12 PWM servos.
There is an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) for balancing, so that this thing stores “muscle memory!”
Think on that: the Petoi Bittle detects its own body’s orientation and its level of acceleration to use for balancing it on the four legs, and then it remembers how it fared against the environment.
Remember that scene in The Matrix Revolutions where all the creepy little bots start to emerge in the Machine City covering walls, floors and ceilings?
That could be where we are going at the rate something like the Petoi Bittle is being funded and selling its semi-autonomous robot dog for less than a couple hundred bucks.
Hell, it is worth getting one just to scare the hell out of your nosy neighbor, isn’t it?
For all of you coders out there, you can input a lot into the OpenCat code, built off of Arduino.
How exactly does this bad boy run, you ask?
Well, not too fast as it is a tiny bot.
But to the point:
Bittle is driven by our OpenCat code. It has 3K lines of Arduino codes excluding 3rd party libraries. It defines the minimal data structure and algorithms for performing quadruped motion. We also provide example commander and parser in Python so that you can send instructions from other devices. The code is already running on thousands of small quadruped robots, including many variants of OpenCat.
Go small and go hard with Petoi Bittle.
Next week Judgement Day 2020!
