The Chinese company Xiaomi unexpectedly presented its new robot dog called CyberDog, which will be released in a limited edition.
CyberDog's design resembles that of the Spot robot dog from Boston Dynamics. However, Xiaomi's development is slightly lighter – 3 kg versus 5.2 kg.
From the in-house developed high-performance servo to the centimeter-scale obstacle avoidance and navigation, here’s everything that makes #XiaomiCyberDog a true beast. pic.twitter.com/T7JFj9V94X
— Xiaomi (@Xiaomi) August 10, 2021
The robot dog can follow the owner and move at 3.2 m/s (while Spot's speed is 3.9 m/s). At the same time, CyberDog "sees" the world around it and can go around obstacles on the way. The robot can also respond to voice commands, and you can control it using the app. By the way, CyberDog knows how to do somersaults, too.
The robot is based on the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX AI platform, the most compact AI supercomputer. In addition, CyberDog has 11 sensors throughout its body.
At the moment, Xiaomi plans to release 1,000 of these robots at a price of about $1,500. It is not yet clear in which regions the novelty will be sold. In comparison, the Spot dog robot's price is $74,000.
Xiaomi noted that the target audience for CyberDog is brand fans, as well as engineers and robotics enthusiasts. This is why the robot dog can be customized: for example, you can add lidars, cameras to it, etc. Xiaomi also added that CyberDog uses open-source algorithms, and the current version was released to see what technology enthusiasts can do with the robot.