Xiaomi Vice President Talk About CyberDog Robot
Not long ago, Lei Jun released many flagship products such as Xiaomi MIX 4 and Tablet 5 Series in his annual speech. And, also brought Easter Egg at the end of the conference – Xiaomi’s first bio-inspired quadruped robot CyberDog.
Xiaomi CyberDog made an eye-catching appearance and was once on the hot search. Of course, there are quite a few people who don’t understand why Xiaomi is suddenly involved in the bionic robot industry. So today, Xiaomi group vice president Chang Cheng through the Weibo post answered several questions regarding the concerns of Xiaomi’s CyberDog. (Below is Chang Cheng’s translated post):
Why do you want to make a bionic quadruped robot?
CyberDog was born out of Xiaomi’s deep-rooted engineer culture. It started as a small project developed by Xiaomi engineers in their spare time, and it was only after it was recognized by Lei that the project team was set up to invest money and resources into the R&D phase. I am also proud that Xiaomi has such passionate and exploratory engineers.
Of course, this is still a decision to invest in the future. On the one hand, bionic robots have huge market potential in service, engineering, security, medical, and many other fields in the future. On the other hand, Xiaomi, as a global technology company, needs to lay out its technology in cutting-edge fields and consolidate its patent reserve as early as possible. The process of exploring bionic robots is also doing technical pre-research, in which machine vision, navigation and obstacle avoidance, human-machine interaction, Al voice algorithms, and other technologies can feed cell phones, smart homes, and other industries.
What can CyberDog do now?
CyberDog is still in the engineering exploration stage, what is being done is to ensure the stability of the device and the experience of the basic functions. In addition to making a series of cute actions, CyberDog brings together several Xiaomi technical advantages, such as face recognition, human detection, and pedestrian re-recognition technology to achieve active following function, let the CyberDog robot go out with you to walk a corner is no problem.
It can also use SLAM map building and navigation obstacle avoidance technology to let the CyberDog Robot draw a map for the home; through the built-in Xiaomi’s AI assistant voice technology, shouting “CyberDog” to help you check the weather, control the smart devices at home along with open-source co-creation, the egg can do more and more things.
Why open-source co-creation?
CyberDog’s initial vision was an open-source project, and the pricing of RMB 9,999 was a loss. We wanted to build a complete hardware development platform to facilitate developers to explore more possibilities of bionic robots, and we did. Xiaomi’s hardware provides self-researched motors, rich sensors, and extended interfaces; motion control algorithms are based on the open-source. The computing platform is equipped with the ROS 2 platform and provides rich interfaces, creating a more stable and comprehensive robot system overall, which brings great convenience to developers and geek enthusiasts for secondary development.
The bionic robotics industry is currently in a global co-creation phase. Xiaomi wants to be the leader and drive more developers to contribute to this field through open source, and quickly promote the progress of the industry. Finally, I would like to advertise that Xiaomi Robotics Lab has been established, and I hope that more engineers who are passionate about technology exploration will join Xiaomi and explore the future together. We also welcome geeks and enthusiasts who are interested in the “CyberDog” to come to the CyberDog circle in the Xiaomi community to discuss with us.
