Xiaomi’s CyberDog is a robotic version of man’s best friend

• Xiaomi has forayed into the field of robotics with its first solution, the CyberDog.
  
• CyberDog is a robotic version of a dog and promises to mimic the movements and behaviour of its natural counterpart.
  
• To kickstart development, Xiaomi has open-sourced the CyberDog, allowing third-party developers to develop new use cases and implement their ideas.
  

Smartphone maker Xiaomi has dipped its toes in the field of robotics that is dominated by names like Boston Dynamics, with the announcement of CyberDog, a robotic version of the man’s best friend.

The CyberDog is Xiaomi’s first quadruped robotic companion – it is open source, so developers can develop use cases and implement their own ideas. Enlisting community support is essential for a product that is currently in very early stages of development.

The Xiaomi CyberDog is powered by the company’s in-house servo motors that the company says offers it “great speed, agility” and a wide range of motion. Its blog post states that the CyberDog can conduct high-speed movements of up to 3.2m/s, roughly translating to 12km/hour.

The CyberDog can also do things like backflips, responding to touch thanks to sensors, but it cannot give the furry experience that a normal dog would.

On a serious note, powering these complex actions is Nvidia’s Jetson Xavier NX AI computing platform, which comprises two deep learning acceleration engines, allowing the CyberDog to learn and adapt according to its experiences.

Leveraging the power of 21 trillion operations per second

The Xavier NX platform produces 21 trillion operations per second (TOPS), allowing the dog to perform a wide range of actions, but most importantly, let it move swiftly and naturally, sensing depths to avoid obstacles and gauging an area. The CyberDog is also trained to identify human faces and postures, patting, smiling, among other things, allowing them to interact the same way as an actual dog.

The depth-sensing algorithm is tuned by Intel’s RealSense chipset, paired with interactive artificial intelligence (AI) operated cameras, ultrawide angle fish-eye cameras for binocular vision and computer vision algorithm training.

Enlisting community support for its products is not new for Xiaomi – the company acquired the community-made MIUI ecosystem a decade ago to power its smartphones. It has also used community development as one of the primary tools to make its devices popular amongst enthusiasts during the early days of its smartphone journey.

It will be interesting to see if Xiaomi is able to replicate this with its robotics solutions as well. The CyberDog is priced at CNY 9,999 (approx. ₹1,15,000) and Xiaomi plans to sell 1,000 units initially.

Whether personal robotics solutions like this one will take off or not remains to be seen.

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