| A Little Robot Quadruped On Kickstarter |
| Written by Lucy Black |
| Sunday, 20 September 2020 |
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After is successful crowdfunding campaign in 2018 for its robotic kitten, Nybble, Petoi has now introduced Bittle, a palm-sized robot dog and has already been pledged more than six times its $50,000 goal on Kickstarter. There's still time to pre-order the Biitle kit for $225, a discount on its subsequent price. Bittle is the second product to be launched by Petoi and is described as: a tiny but powerful robot that can play tricks like real animals. A fuller description is: Bittle is a palm-sized robot that moves with four legs rather than wheels. Legged motion gives it more freedom to navigate unstructured terrains, and expresses the joy of life whenever it moves. Such dynamic maneuverability was only seen on a few luxury robots from the best labs or tycoon companies previously, such as Boston Dynamics Spot or Sony Aibo. We came up with a grassroots solution to simplify the system to make it affordable and mass-producible. The introduction on Kickstarter continues: Evolving with an open-source gene, Bittle is an open platform to fuse multiple makers' gadgets into one organic system. With our customized Arduino board coordinating all instinctive and sophisticated movements, you can clip on various sensors to bring in perception. You could also inject artificial intelligence capabilities by mounting a Raspberry Pi or other AI chips through wired/wireless connections.
Bittle and Nybble, who is also seen in this Kickstarter video, both come from the OpenCat project We first came across it in February when its creator Rongzhong Li put the project on Hackster.io and on the Arduino Project Hub. At that time we expressed reservations that, despite its name, the project wasn't open source but before Nybble was announced in October 2018 an MIT licence had been added to code on its GitHub repo. So while Bitttle, like Nybble, is being sold as a commercial product, albeit a kit of parts, its code is freely available.
Although all the Early Bird kits have already been snapped up, the Kickstarter special kit is still available priced $225, a discount on the price after the campaign finishes. It comprises Plastic body parts plus various servos, a rechargeable 7.4V Li-on battery pack and bluetooth and wifi dongles. It also includes the NYBoard V1, a customized Arduino board with rich peripherals, which powers Bittle and has a socket for mounting a Rapberry Pi and Bittle's head has been designed as a clip for extensible modules from Seeed Grove, such as a Pi camera.
For $400 you can pre-order a Bittle Reseach pack which has twice the number of servos and an extra battery and includes a sensor pack (available separately on the Kickstarter campaign for $80) which brings high-level perception to Bittle. There's already a growing Community to join in which is another good reason to snap up a Bittle at a discount price. The deadline is October 1, 2020.
More InformationPetoi Bittle: A Palm-sized Robot Dog for STEM and Fun Related ArticlesAdopt Nybble - OpenCat's First Kitten Now We Can All Build A SpotMicro
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| Last Updated ( Sunday, 20 September 2020 ) |
