Robo Dog Showdown Kia Robo Dog vs Real Intelligent Robot Dogs
Posted on 11 March, 2022 by Micheal Alexander
Kia America has showcased a super cute robo dog in its All-Electric Kia EV6 Super Bowl commercial. It looks as real as it gets. But it's really a beautiful Computer-generated imagery (CGI) job that paints a very cool futuristic robo dog concept. It's not a physical product that you can actually buy.
Challenges of Quadruped Four-legged Robotic System
Robotics is an interdisciplinary subject involving science, technology, engineering, math, and art (STEAM). A realistic robot requires precise integration of structure, circuit, software, production to perform specific tasks. Open Source Robot
Especially for a quadruped robot, its movements and balance all rely on the instant and discrete foot-ground contacts. The four legs are equivalent to four robotic arms installed inversely and have to collaborate both in spatial and time to make the smooth and stable motion, and avoid a collision. The robot should be free to patrol independently from power/control cables, which puts a higher demand for power, perception, and adaption.
All working robots have experienced a long search with empirical instinct, careful calculation, and thorough experiments, to converge to a practical solution.
The Evolution of Robot Dog
Humans have been fascinated by robot dogs. Robot dogs have frequently coexisted with humans in cartoons, fiction, movies, and TV series such as Metalhead (Black Mirror).
Sony Aibo was the pioneer in bringing the concept of robot dog to the consumer market in 1999.
Tekno the Robotic Puppy (also known as Teksta the Robotic Puppy) was a popular electronic robotic toy that launched in late 2000.
There are other robot dogs targeting the massive toy market. Those remote control pet robot puppy dogs actually run on wheels, so that they cannot have realistic dog-like limb movements. Examples include WowWee CHiP and Chippies robot dogs, and Zoomer robot dog.
There were only a handful of laboratories and companies that can manufacture quadruped walking robots back in 2019. Boston Dynamics is the outstanding representative of industrial quadruped robots as its demo videos have attracted a great following. In 2021, It was once used as a police dog for NYPD in NYC, but critics likened it to a dystopian surveillance drone.
Robot dogs also have uses cases for the military. One example is that Air Force deployed robot dogs from Ghost Robotics and Immersive Wisdom to add an extra level of protection to the base.
There are only a handful of laboratories and companies that can manufacture quadruped walking robots by 2019. Boston Dynamics is the outstanding representative of industrial quadruped robots as its demo videos have produced great followings.
In the academic field, MIT open-sourced its solution for a small quadruped robot in 2019. Its work greatly promoted the research of industrial quadruped robots. However, apart from lowering the barrier of research and development, the various hardware required by the quadruped robot often needs to be specially designed and customized. The supply chain supporting cost is high, the cycle is long, and it is difficult to achieve mass production. Four Legged Robot
By 2022, many more robots startup companies develop large quadruped robots similar to mini cheetah ad spot mini. They are still at a high price tag that only the rich can consider buying.
Because of the lack of mass adoption, robot dog's applications are very unclear, and it may take a long time to find the product-user fit and product-market fit.