sit(); Good Boy!
Bittle is a programmable, budget-friendly quadruped robot dog that won't chew up your furniture.
Dogs may be known as man’s best friend, but I ask you, would a true friend wake you up at five in the morning every day to take them outside? Would a friend steal your lunch off the kitchen counter the second you turn your back? If only it was possible to have a dog without all the problems...
Well, the Petoi Bittle robotic dog may not be as cuddly as a real dog, but it is pretty cute, and it looks like loads of fun. But the best feature is that Bittle always obeys your commands.
Looking like a tiny, palm-sized version of the much more expensive Boston Dynamics robot Spot, Bittle offers the fun of a quadruped robot on a small budget. Bittle is offered as a kit that you build yourself. The body consists of interlocking, puzzle piece-like injection-molded plastic components, with a minimal number of screws needed. Movement is actuated by a set of nine servos, eight for walking joints, and one for head movement.
Main processing is handled with an Arduino-compatible NyBoard V1 board, which can PWM up to 12 servos, and capture inertial measurement unit data needed to keep the robot balanced. An included infrared remote can be used to trigger basic actions. The included Li-ion battery pack powers the robot for about an hour.
For more advanced creations, the NyBoard provides a socket that can be used to attach a Raspberry Pi. Adding a Raspberry Pi connects the robot to WiFi, and provides the additional memory and processing power needed to run simple machine learning models. An optional sensor pack further extends functionality by adding a camera, gesture sensor, motion sensor, distance sensor, and more.
Bittle can be programmed in C, Arduino IDE, or Python, depending on your preferences. It is compatible with the OpenCat project, so you will not have to do all the work of figuring out how to coordinate eight servos to make a quadruped walk smoothly. Petoi also has an online forum for community members to discuss their projects and get help along the way.
The only question I have yet to be answered about the Bittle — if you attach a Raspberry Pi and train it on a dataset that teaches it how to act more dog-like — how long will it take before it tears up the couch?