Xiaomi CyberDog

What CyberDog is

Xiaomi CyberDog, nicknamed Tiedan, is a bionic quadruped robot: a machine that walks on four legs instead of wheels. Legged robots attract attention because legs can go where wheels cannot, such as up steps, over rubble and across uneven ground. However, they are much harder to control, because the machine has to keep calculating how to stay balanced while it moves. Xiaomi showed CyberDog publicly for the first time at its autumn product launch on the evening of 10 August 2021.^[1] Xiaomi did not present it as an ordinary consumer product; it released it as an engineering exploration edition.^[2]

Price and first users

Xiaomi priced the CyberDog engineering exploration edition at 9,999 yuan per unit and limited it to 1,000 units worldwide.^[1] In the first stage, 400 users would take part in community beta testing.^[1] Alongside the hardware, Xiaomi described an open-source plan: the engineering exploration edition would be opened to developers through a robot open-source community, so that users could share work and change how the machine behaves.^[2] Buying the robot was therefore closer to joining a development programme than to buying a finished gadget.

Body and movement

According to China News Service, CyberDog weighs 14 kg and can run at up to 3.2 m/s.^[1] Xiaomi's own specification page adds detail on the drive system. The self-developed servo motor produces up to 32 N·m of output torque and a maximum rotation speed of 220 rpm.^[2] The 3.2 m/s maximum walking speed was measured in Xiaomi's own laboratory; the maximum safe walking speed given for the robot is 1.6 m/s.^[2] The gap between the two numbers is worth noticing. The laboratory figure says something about what the motors can do; the safe figure says something about what the machine can do around people and obstacles.

Computing and sensors

The robot carries 11 high-precision sensors.^[2] Its main computer is an edge AI module built on NVIDIA's Jetson Xavier NX, with 21 TOPS of computing power.^[1] Xiaomi's page gives the module's parts: 384 CUDA cores, 48 Tensor Cores, six Carmel ARM CPUs and two deep learning accelerators, rated at 21 TOPS, plus a 128 GB SSD.^[2] The robot also has three Type-C ports and one HDMI port for external devices such as lights, panoramic cameras, action cameras and lidar.^[2] Those ports explain the design idea. A legged robot is useful mainly as a moving base for sensors and software, so CyberDog was built to accept hardware that users attach themselves.

Where it sits

A quadruped has to survive being knocked about and stand up again on rough ground, and its control software has to settle the question of balance many times a second. Machines of this kind have mostly been built in small numbers for research work. CyberDog's place is set by its price and its run size: 9,999 yuan for one of 1,000 units, sold together with an open-source community.^[1][2] It made a legged robot something an individual developer or a small team could buy, and it left the software side — what a four-legged machine can be taught to do — to the people outside the company who bought one.^[2]