| Unitree Go1 - Your Four-Legged Robot Companion |
| Written by Harry Fairhead | |||
| Sunday, 13 June 2021 | |||
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A new robot dog is being put through its paces. The Unitree Go1 looks a lot like Boston Dynamic's Spot but with a base price of $2,700 it's a lot more affordable. Go1, which is described as a Bionic Companion Robot, comes from Chinese firm Unitree Robotics. In its promo video we see it doing backflips from a great height, acting as a portable, although rather small, shopping basket and accompanying its human on a run, capable, we are told, of a top speed of 17 kph. Over the years we have reported on many robot dogs, from beasts like Boston Dynamics BigDog, a quadruped robot capable of traversing difficult terrain designed for use as a pack mule to the tabletop-sized, open source Raspberry Pi Spot Micro and, of course, Spot which is now commercially available with a price tag of $74,500. Whereas Boston Dynamics is a long-established robotics company, acquired first by Google and now by Softbank, Unitree is a recent startup, founded by Xingxing Wang who developed a robot dog named 'XDog' (X for a sense of mystery) during his postgraduate study. By June 2016 XDog and its videos has gained attention worldwide attention. Xingxing decided to quit his job started the company with the help of an angel investor. Three quadruped robots preceded Go1: Laikago, named after the space dog 'Laika' in 2017, Aliengo, for professional usage in 2019 and A1, targeting at the education market and released in January 2020 during CSE 2020.
There are three versions of the Go1 robot, including the G01 Air base model at $2700, the G01 at $3500, and the G01 Edu at $8500. The $3500 model is expected to be the most popular unit, promising 50 percent more battery life than the base version. The Edu model has improved computing, seven kilograms of total payload capacity (compared to five kilograms for the other models), foot-force sensors, lidar, and hardware extension capabilities, as well as API access.
Unitree says it wants to make quadrupedal robots as affordable and popular as smartphones and drones and to judge from the video Go1 could well fill the role of a robot pet and have mass-market appeal.
More InformationRelated ArticlesSpot Is Boston Dynamics' New Robot "Dog" Now We Can All Build A SpotMicro How Many Robot Dogs Do You Need To Haul A Truck? Introducing SpotMini - A Domestic Pet Helper To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 14 June 2021 ) |
