More Bark for Your Buck

With the increasing demand for automation and intelligent systems, more people are looking to educate themselves in the field of robotics. However, the journey of learning robotics can be filled with challenges, making it a demanding and often intimidating task. Building and programming robots requires a vast amount of knowledge and skills in areas ranging from mechanical engineering and electrical engineering to computer science and mathematics.

Learning all of these subjects to a professional level is a significant undertaking, and often requires many years of dedicated study. Furthermore, hands-on experience is essential in robotics, but access to equipment and technology can be a major obstacle. Most universities and research institutions have the necessary equipment, but the cost of these resources can be prohibitively expensive for individuals seeking to learn on their own.

The developers of the agile, open source, quadruped robot by the name of XGO 2 are seeking to make learning robotics simpler and more affordable with their user-friendly platform. While it may not be cheap, the starting price tag of $449 is pretty low in the world of robotics, and a lot of hardware is included for that money. This dog-like robot has an additional arm and gripper to enable complex interactions with its environment. It is also loaded with sensors, actuators, and processing units that enable precision control, stabilization, and artificial intelligence applications like object, voice, and gesture recognition.

At the heart of the XGO 2 is a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with a quad-core Arm Cortex-A72 CPU running at 1.5 GHz and 2 GB or 4 GB RAM options (these days, this alone is worth half the price of the kit). High-performance servos give life to the 12 active joints in the quadruped’s legs. Another servo controls the three-degree of freedom arm and gripper that give the robot the ability to grasp, lift, carry, place, and drag a variety of small objects. With the help of a six-axis inertial measurement unit, the movements produced by these actuators are fluid and highly stable.

An onboard camera feeds information about the environment into the robot for advanced functions like navigation and gesture control. The system also comes standard with an onboard LCD that can give real-time feedback to the user. Since the processing is performed by a Raspberry Pi, there are many options for development. Robot Operating System packages come preinstalled for a standard robot programming interface, and XGO 2 can also be programmed with Python or Blockly to suit each developer’s tastes.

The robot comes in two varieties, the XGO-Lite 2 and the XGO-Mini 2. Both are quite similar, but the XGO-Mini 2 is a bit larger and comes with more RAM and a larger battery. It is being offered at $749 at this time, with the XGO-Lite 2 selling for $449.

The XGO 2 platform looks very attractive as a robotics learning platform. It is currently on offer over at Kickstarter, so the usual disclaimers apply — you back the project, and they ultimately may or may not be able to deliver the goods. This same team was responsible for a very successful Kickstarter campaign with their original XGO robot, however, so they should be well equipped to follow through with their plans to ship the product in the fourth quarter of 2023.