Agenda
- Project Status
- Problem
- Solution and Product
- What's Mini Pupper's value?
- Why does Mini Pupper Stand Out?
- Education course
- How to use it?
- How to Build?
Project Status
Mini Pupper 1 was launched in 2021, and Mini Pupper 2 was launched in 2023. Mini Pupper new version will be launched in 2026.
Mini Pupper will make robotics easier for schools, homeschool families, enthusiasts, and beyond.
- AI: Multimodal generative AI and OpenClaw.
- ROS: support ROS 1 and ROS 2 SLAM&Navigation.
- OpenCV: supports 3D camera module and single camera module.
- Open-source: DIY and custom what you want, won a HackadayPrize!
- Raspberry Pi: it’s super expandable, endorsed by Raspberry Pi.
- SDK: support developers to DIY their skill applications.
- Skill Store: Empowering developers to publish their skills and monetize their apps.
Mini Pupper was shown both on the first page of Kickstarter and Makuake campaign platform and got many backers!
ProblemYou maybe see many demos from Boston Dynamics Spot Mini, and so on, many guys want to own their own robot dog to explore the functions, but the price is too high to accept, and it is not easy to explore the robot dog features.
TurtleBot is very convenient for wheeled robot study, but not legged robots. That means, there is no ROS, open-source robot dog platform to study at less than $1,000USD.
Beginning in 2020, as the Stanford Pupper vendor, we shipped many Stanford Pupper units worldwide. After such global success with Pupper, we took to heart all the feedback from this endeavor. What do our customers want in our products? What kind of products do they like? After more than 11 months pursuing these requests, we would like to show you what we came up with. Mini Pupper!
Mini Pupper is the ROS, open-source robot dog platform that supports ROS SLAM, Navigation, and OpenCV AI features with Lidar, camera sensors. It's really a Boston Dynamics Spot Robot Dog in the Palm and legged "TurtleBot" for study at less than $500USD.
Mini Pupper will make robotics easier for schools, homeschool families, enthusiasts, and beyond.
What's Mini Pupper's value?Open source: DIY what your custom robot dogIn June 2021, MangDang released Mini Pupper on the Stanford Pupper website in collaboration with Nathan Kau, the original creator of Stanford Pupper, to bring to market a commercial and reasonably priced educational quadruped robot that anyone could engagingly use for fun robotics research and experiments.
- Software custom
Gait Performance
You can use Mini Pupper to explore many gait performances, such as Trot (diagonal pairs), Pace (lateral pairs), and the Bound (front and rear pairs).
Facial Animation
You can easily custom your own facial animation, mechanical shell, and your own algorithms, we will supply enough guide documents and videos to make it easy. Here are three preset animations, you can change and make your own set with just one click!
- Hardware custom
You can DIY and customize a UNIQUE MiniPupper in the world. Check out those MiniPuppers created by our fans!
- What’s More
Raspberry Pi
Based on Raspberry Pi, MiniPupper is super expandable. You can explore more with MiniPupper!
Mini Pupper is a dog-shaped robot that is aimed at stimulating and empowering your creativity. That’s why we are not presenting it as a closed project that can’t evolve from here. On the contrary, Mini Pupper leverages Ubuntu and ROS to operate its FSN (Full Self-Navigation) System.
Mini Pupper supports not only Melodic but also Noetic. ROS2 is also in our pipeline.
- SLAM
MiniPupper supports SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), it can map its environment and learn in real-time from things around using Lidar or a camera sensor.
- Navigation
With the map, MiniPupper can answer "where am I? Where am I going?" you can call it self-driving technology.
Mini Pupper supports OpenCV's latest 3D camera module, named OAK-D LITE, it brings the superpowers of Spatial AI to the price-point necessary to unlock all sorts of applications. With the module, Mini Pupper can run face detect, recognition, object detect, recognition, etc.
With OAK-D-Lite vision, it's now your Border-Collie-level smart robotic dog. Border Collies are amazing because they can learn very specific hand signals (and they're neurotic about them). Now Mini Pupper can be just as amazing (and neurotic)!
Why Mini Pupper Stands Out?Custom Servo
Our Mini Pupper servo is a custom servo to meet the requirements of our new Pupper! Compact, Durable, Unique. To run the Mini Pupper organically and smoothly, high torque & high-fidelity servos were required. We tested many servos on the market and have not found any 9g servo up to the task. After too many Q.C issues we finally gave up on off-the-shelf hobbyist servos, the last thing we want is for our intelligent customers to be let down by poor quality servos. So, we spent several months optimizing and configuring a servo that would work for our project, including tuning the servo parameters ourselves! It is now named Mini Pupper servo.
12 DOF (degree of freedom)
The Mini Pupper has 12 DOF (degree of freedom), unlike the 8 DOF available through similar projects. There was a lot of debate within our team about whether we should keep with norms and produce the same 8 DOF. After much debate, we concluded 8 DOF robots lack the ability to follow natural biological movements. The benefits of an 8 DOF quadruped only seemed to benefit the producer as the cost of the robot and parts required would be less. But we would have lost the original inspiration of the project… Which was to provide our customers with the highest quality best performing robot in this price range. All the servos are controlled one by one by a PCA9685. The gait performance is dependent on the 12 servos control loop time, requiring more effort to optimize 12 DOF vs 8DOF. There were doubts we could accomplish this with such a low price point. Although it was a challenge, after several months Mini Pupper is the first consumer 12 DOF quadruped robot in the world with a mass production intention.
Education Courses- Online document.
- IEEE workshop guide
- Amazon AWS Robotics Blog
- Amazon 2022 Dance Robot Workshops Guide
- Amazon 2023 LLM(large language model) Workshops Guide.
You can use the controller to enjoy and explore Mini Pupper's many features. Besides that, you can easily custom your own facial animation and algorithms by PC, we will supply enough guide documents and videos to make it easy.
How to BuildTo get started, check out the pages linked below on part sourcing and assembly.
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