Canonical Boasts of Ubuntu Underpinnings for Xiaomi's Affordable Quadrupedal CyberDog Robot Platform

Canonical and Xiaomi have shared more details about CyberDog, a quadrupedal robot platform built by the latter and running a long-term support version of the former's Ubuntu Linux distribution.

"CyberDog is developers' technological partner from the future," explains Xiaomi's Huang Changjiang of the platform, which the company sells for a base price of $1,540. "It equips in-house-made high-performance servo motors, high computing ability, with built-in AI for visual detection system and voice interaction system, supporting a variety of bionic motion gestures."

Inside the quadrupedal robot body is an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX computing system tied to a suite of 11 sensors, including computer vision cameras and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) systems, running Canonical's Ubuntu 18.04 — an operating system that is, admittedly, three years old, but which is a Long Term Support (LTS) release with updates available through to 2028.

Huang also revealed plans to work to bring the benefits of the Robot Operating System (ROS) to the CyberDog: "We believe in the present and future of ROS 2. Its rich set of libraries and tools provides market readiness to robotics developers," Huang claims. "CyberDog is providing the platform to leverage this in the best hardware. ROS deployment on Ubuntu becomes easier and makes secondary development more friendly. We aim to unlock this rich ecosystem of applications and algorithms for CyberDog."

"CyberDog’s affordability and open source nature accelerate the research for new use-cases," a Canonical spokesperson writes of the robot. "We're already seeing four legged robots exploring mines or helping first responders in natural disasters. These devices have also found uses in the construction industry or helping with industrial inspections, where terrain maneuverability poses a challenge. More and more applications are being discovered every day, thanks to this collaborative work."

More details about Canonical's side of the project can be found on the company blog, while information about the CyberDog itself can be found in Xiaomi's launch announcement.