We all should’ve accepted by now that if climate change doesn’t kill us our robot overlords will. That being said, why do some companies feel the need to encourage that scenario? Case in point, Xiaomi has revealed its new AI robot “dog” that could lead the future revolution.
Most people are aware of robot quadrupeds thanks to Boston Dynamics’ dog, Spot.
We’ve seen Spot do plenty of useful things, from sniffing out radiation levels at Chernobyl to opening doors. Unfortunately, we’ve also seen instances of Spot being weaponised, which can only mean one thing for the future of humanity.
Meet Xiaomi’s CyberDog
Chinese electronics company Xiaomi has created all sorts of products, from mobile phones to vacuums to scooters. Now it can also add robot dogs to that list.
Xiaomi revealed its new quadruped robot earlier today, nicknamed CyberDog.
The robot dog features Xiaomi’s in-house high-performance servo motor and can get up to a maximum torque of 32 Nm and a rotation speed of 220Rpm.
It can also reach a top speed of 3.2 m/s and also do cool things like backflips.
Its brain is an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX with an AI supercomputer made up of 384 CUDA Cores, 48 Tensor Cores, a 6 Carmel ARM CPU, and 2 deep learning acceleration engines. I have no idea what that is but it sure sounds like it’ll be smarter than me.
From the in-house developed high-performance servo to the centimeter-scale obstacle avoidance and navigation, here’s everything that makes #XiaomiCyberDog a true beast. pic.twitter.com/T7JFj9V94X
— Xiaomi (@Xiaomi) August 10, 2021
CyberDog also has 11 high precision sensors which give it instant feedback to help guide its movements.
Xiaomi is also trying to imbue CyberDog with some pet-like qualities, so owners can use voice assistant commands to wake and control the robot as well as using an accompanying remote and app.
In terms of design, the resemblance between Spot and CyberDog is pretty clear, however, Xiaomi’s robot comes in a sleek black design rather than bright yellow.
What does one use a CyberDog for?
The answer is, we’ll find out.
Xiaomi has built the CyberDog on open-source algorithms and, rather than being a product, is encouraging developers to use the robot to help contribute to the field and innovate further.
Xiaomi is only releasing 1000 units of CyberDog at ¥9,999 ($AU2,099) for Xiaomi fans, engineers and robotic enthusiasts.
A lot of people are suspicious of these quadruped bots thanks to one particularly scarring episode of Black Mirror, but it seems the robot dog market is not slowing down. In fact, we can all actively contribute to it now.