CARA 2.0 – “I Built a Better Robot Dog” (opens in new tab)

3 DOF per leg, so it needs 12 motors and controllers. Getting that under $1000 is nice.

Here's the US$18 motor: [1] Those things are getting really cheap. He did have to rewind it, though, for more turns with thinner wire. The manufacturer mentions that you can order with "custom Kv", which means you might be able to get a different winding from the factory if you order a reasonable quantity. Especially if you tell them that makes them "robot motors".

Motor overheating might be a problem. The dog, just standing, has its motors stalled under load, converting power to heat. Drones don't do that. Temperature feedback would help if this thing has to operate for extended periods. Remember yesterday's article on humanoid robots and their cooling problems.

The motor controller is nice too, and cheap at $49. Needed fixes to the firmware, but that's not surprising at the price. High performance motor controllers used to cost about $1000.

Repurposed drone technology has done wonders for legged robots. We're not quite at the point where limb drive hardware is off the shelf, but it's way better than it used to be.

[1] https://www.xntyi.com/tyi-5008-kv335/kv400-high-speed-brushl...

I love Aaed. Not only are the youtube video excellently produced and well researched, the website is a mine of information.

This is spectacular as a reference, which youtube isn't

The jumps are pretty impressive, this thing has some power. I'd be very curious how fast you could get this dog with some reinforcement learning for a proper transverse gallop gait - and if it converges towards a gallop naturally, or if it discovers some other fast gait patterns during learning.

Depending on the max speed of the motors/legs, giving it longer foot pads might be necessary for a good gallop. Intuitively, it looks a bit... "low gear" in the videos.

As it so happens 'cara' https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cara#Irish is the Irish [Gaelic] word for 'friend' (probably related to words like Italian 'caro' etc.) so CARA is not a bad name for a robot dog!

Very nice project. If you like this, the Pupper quadruped robot project by Stanford University is also interesting, with RL training pipeline as well and well-documented open source instructions for 3d printing etc. https://pupper-v3-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gui...

People are all discussing the technical aspects of the device, which is great and all, but forgetting the one aspect I am in awe of: how googly eyes once again make everything 300% better.

Seeing stuff like this, I am wondering why the hell I am doing software. This is much cooler than CRUD for DB data nth time.

Awesome video. It's interesting, informative, and entertaining.

Founders I talk to that are doing hardware, broadly speaking, say it's a competitive advantage as it's not as crowded. Content like Aaed's will hopefully nudge more people into it.

Rewinding the motors manually to increase torque is cheating if you can't scale that up and keep the cost down.

And, if you can scale that up, then why even mention it? It's not relevant.

That's impressive! good job

I like the wide layout of the site but just on a readability front on a widescreen monitor after the opening more narrow paragraphs it changes to full width text layout and those could benefit from a `columns: 2` in CSS to split them since reading long width paragraphs is a bit difficult.

this guy is going to get a high paying job at some defense contractor somewhere and we'll never see anything he does again.

As a man who always desperately wanted a Sony AIBO (and is now only put off by the bonkers $300 a year AI subscription), I am unduly excited.

its a fantastic achievement and the guy seems amazingly talented, is it a big achievement? leaves me feeling flat... maybe im just jealous lol.

All I can think of is slippage and the lack of precision though I know I’m wrong because he spends a significant part of a previous video explaining why it isn’t an issue.

Qugv looks cool and futuristic and has that wow factor, great in expos and milking investors’ money, but practically speaking? They are useless, they have the bad mobility of UGV (compared to UAV), and the bad endurance of UAV (compared to UGV), so they are the mix of worst of both worlds. There’s also other technical issues but yeah, only good for marketing, no matter how they try to push them in defense or whatever, they never materialize.