Xiaomi explained why the CyberDog robot dog is so cheap and showed a video of its backflip
Recently Xiaomi company unexpectedly introduced its first robot-dog CyberDog, which should be a worthy competitor to Spot from Boston Dynamics. At presentation many details were not disclosed, so vice president Chang Cheng (Chang Cheng) gave interesting details on social media.
What is known
As it turned out, CyberDog appeared as a small project of the Xiaomi engineers, which they were engaged in their free time. After managers paid attention to it and invested money in the development . After all, such robots have great potential - for example, they can be used in services, engineering, security and medicine.
In addition the device uses current technology solutions like machine vision, which provides navigation and detects obstacles, voice command recognition with AI and other technologies that can later be applied in smartphones and devices "smart" home.
But for now it is still a research product that continues to improve. That's why it and got software open source: so developers can contribute and extend the functionality of the robot. For the same reason CyberDog and have a low price tag - only 1540 dollars. For comparison, Spot costs about $75,000. That is Xiaomi gives the robot not only at cost, but also itself at a loss.
Well, as a bonus the company showed a short video with CyberDog in leading role. On camera he does a backflip - though this moment is shown for some reason not until the end.