We covered Mini-Pupper's launch back in 2021 and now there is an even better, second generation, of this low-cost and capable quadruped robot. If you want to see what AI can bring to a small robot, this is your chance.

This new generation of the Mini-Pupper is still reasonably priced at around $450 for a kit on Kickstarter. You can have it in yellow or red. There is also a lower cost and simpler Turtle robot at around $200, but the it is the Mini-Pupper 2G that is interesting. It claims that you can have it built in 15 minutes and I think that is reasonable.

What is new about the 2G is its emphasis on AI. It works with OpenAI, Gemini or Claude.

What can you do with it? The whole point is for you to answer this question, but there are some suggestions. The most fanciful example is as a roving dog at the dinner table recording how many calories you are consuming. I say fanciful because it is difficult to know how well this would work. You can estimate calorie content from images, but how accurate it is can't really be gauged. There is also the matter of having a small robot stomping around the dinner table.

As well as AI you can also make use of ROS, Robot Operating System and OpenCV. The brains of the outfit is a Pi CM4 with ESP32 S3 acting as a motor controller, so there should be no problem writing new code for it. There is a 320x240 display screen on the nose and a mic, speaker, touch sensor,

Take look at the promo video:

Mini Pupper 2G has reached its target on Kickstarter three times over. There are still plenty of kits to order, however, and given the success of the original Mini Pupper there seems to be little risk. The first kits should ship in November this year.

It seems like a great way to get started in the increasingly important world of AI-based robotics.

• Harry Fairhead is I Programmer's hardware guru, having worked with microprocessors and electronics in general, for many years. A prolific author, his soon-to-be-published book Programming the ESP32 In C from I/O Press will be invaluable in programming this robot.

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