Mini Pupper: Open-Source,ROS Robot Dog Kit
Mini Pupper will make robotics easier for schools, homeschool families, enthusiasts and beyond.
Picture a dog-shaped quadruped robot that can hop, trot, and run around, supporting 12-DOF, ROS (Robot Operating System) SLAM, Navigation, and OpenCV AI functions—while being inexpensive. Mini Pupper is the dream sidekick for you to learn and experiment with robotics, exploring advanced functions of a dynamic robot that would typically not be available at this price point.
In June 2021, MangDang released Mini Pupper on the Stanford Pupper website in collaboration with Nathan Kau, the original creator of Stanford Pupper, to bring to market a commercial and reasonably priced educational quadruped robot that anyone could
engagingly use for fun robotics research and experiments.
Mini Pupper’s design was based on the feedback we received from our existing customers. The ease of use, assembly and disassembly are the result of precious feedback from users that allowed us to keep improving what ultimately came to be a user-centric robot that you can easily understand, explore, learn from, and play with—and for a price that most can afford!
Mini Pupper is a dog-shaped robot that is aimed at stimulating and empowering your creativity. That’s why we are not presenting it as a closed project that can’t evolve from here. On the contrary, Mini Pupper leverages Ubuntu and ROS to operate its FSN (Full Self-Navigation) System.Mini Pupper supports not only Melodic but also Noetic. ROS2 is also in our pipeline.
MiniPupper supports SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), it can map its environment and learn in real-time from things around using Lidar or a camera sensor.With the map, Mini Pupper can answer "where am I? Where am I going?" you can call it self-driving technology.
Mini Pupper is an open-source dog robot you can explore whatever you want! Mini Pupper's software is compatible with Robot Operating System (ROS) using a forked version of Champ Quadrupedal Framework led by Juan Miguel Jimeno. The software stack runs on a customized hardware based on Stanford's Pupper project. Many thanks to the open source community for making Mini Pupper a reality.
You can use Mini Pupper to explore many gait performances, such as Trot (diagonal pairs), Pace (lateral pairs), and the Bound (front and rear pairs).You can easily custom your own facial animation, mechanical shell, and your own algorithms, we will supply enough guide documents and videos to make it easy. Here are three preset animations, you can change and make your own set by just one click.
You can DIY and customize a UNIQUE MiniPupper in the world. Check out those MiniPuppers created by our fansMini Pupper supports OpenCV's latest 3D camera module, named OAK-D LITE, it brings the superpowers of Spatial AI to the price-point necessary to unlock all sorts of applications. With the module, Mini Pupper can run face detect, recognition, object detect, recognition, etc.
With OAK-D-Lite vision, it's now your Border-Collie-level smart robotic dog. Border Collies are amazing because they can learn very specific hand signals (and they're neurotic about them). Now Mini Pupper can be just as amazing (and neurotic)
Most robots of this category feature an 8 DOF (degree of freedom), which translates into less organic movements. We were not happy with the idea of limiting Mini Pupper to these constraints, so, after extensive debate within our team and research, we were eventually able to create our quadruped robot with a 12 DOF that allows it to follow biological movements but at an affordable price point that isn’t made inaccessible to the average consumer.
You can use the controller to enjoy and explore Mini Pupper's many features. Besides that, you can easily custom your own facial animation and algorithms by PC, we will supply enough guide documents and videos to make it easy.While Mini Pupper provides an exciting journey into the world of robotics for anyone, there’s a central educational mission that this unique robot needs to accomplish. Mini Pupper wants to help you learn about robotics and experiment with this brave new world in a fun way.
That’s why we’re also organizing an online course series that is tied to understanding and exploring Mini Pupper—namely the mechanical, hardware, ROS, SLAM, navigation, AI, and other angles of the robot. In other words, for you, this is the robotic educational experience of a lifetime!
Open source: Mini Pupper is inspired by Stanford Pupper open source project. You can find and download the design files and source code from the Mini Pupper Github project link. Mini Pupper was featured by Hackaday, Hackster, Make, won a Hackaday Prize. We got so much help from the Hackaday community, such as project reviews from Majenta and Mitch, Hack Chat support from Dan Maloney. Really really thanks for all the open source communities.
