Boston Dynamics Spot is cool and all, but it is pricey robot for average Joes to be experimenting with. There are other options emerging from China, like AlphaDog and Unitree A1, for examples.
While significantly cheaper than Spot, those robot dogs are still not something everyone can afford. This is where Petoi Bittle Palm-sized Robot Dog comes in. From the creator of the OpenCat project, Rongzhong Li, Petoi Bittle is the second OpenCat (though style as a dog).
Petoi Bittle is a full-fledged robotic dog you can build and code to give it life. It may be small, but it is totally capable of playing tricks like actual animals. The best part is, it is open-source and totally customizable to what you what the robotic pet to be.
You can rigged it with Arduino board coordinating all instinctive movements, clip on appropriate sensors to bestow it with perception, or introduce Raspberry Pi or other AI chips though wired or wireless connection to enable artificial intelligence.
There is a community behind it too, affording access to tutorials and other project ideas you can explore. The possibilities are pretty much endless. Basically, if you have the will, there are help and components to help make it happen.
Petoi Bittle is pretty much like Spot and other robot dogs we mentioned earlier, only very much smaller and cost way, way lesser. Definitely not the price of a small car.
In fact, it will run you back at just US$225 or more – IF you pre-order it via Kickstarter. The campaign is funded and so, a pledge for a product is a pre-order which will be fulfilled sometime in December 2020.
Images: Petoi/Rongzhong Li.
