A Crash Course in Robotics

The world of robotics is full of opportunities for building innovative tools that can make our lives better. Working with robots is also a great way to pick up skills, as one needs knowledge in a wide range of areas, such as mechanics, electronics, software engineering, and machine learning to bring their ideas to life. But this sort of experience is difficult to come by. Robotic systems are generally very expensive and are meant for use by people that already have a lot of knowledge in the area. So, even if you get your hands on some hardware, you might not be able to understand where to even begin.

A Kickstarter campaign launched by MangDang, the creators of the popular Mini Pupper robot, is working to change that. In their latest campaign, they are offering two new robots — the Turtle Bot and the Mini Pupper 2G. Both of these robots were designed to be powerful — such that their users can gain real experience in robotics — yet also user-friendly and inexpensive. And in addition to being much easier and faster to assemble than their previous offerings, these bots also incorporate generative artificial intelligence into their set of skills so that you can create bigger and better things with them.

Turtle Bot is the low-cost option, and comes equipped with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller running RTOS. Actuation is provided for by either a powerful PWM servo or a serial bus servo with position feedback. The sensing and output options are pretty limited with just a microphone and speaker, but starting at about $150 that is to be expected.

The Mini Pupper 2G is also available as a much more powerful option. This mini quadrupedal dog robot comes equipped with the same hardware as the Turtle Bot, but also much more. It includes a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 to enable much more computationally-intensive tasks to be performed. It also includes a display screen that serves as the face, an inertial measurement unit, touch sensor, and a fairly large battery. Kits start at about $426, and a preassembled robot goes for $457 if you get in on the super early bird deal.

Both of the robots are capable of interacting with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude large language models. MangDang demonstrated how these tools can be used to make a walking voice assistant, which is probably more of a novelty than anything useful in reality. But with some creativity, this could potentially do a lot more. With the ability to reason about the world around them — in some cases even visually — these services could be leveraged to create a very intelligent robot.

Everything in this project is open source, so the source code and schematics are at your disposal. This makes it possible to significantly enhance the function of either robot by adding your own hardware and software. Lidar modules and alternate leg options are also available to help creators build more advanced systems.

Rewards are expected to ship in November and December of this year, so if you are interested in taking the next step in learning robotics, this Kickstarter campaign is one that you should take a closer look at.