Wow!
Hey, what’s up? Sami here. As we all know, Xiaomi has just released its Mi Mix 4,
Mi Pad 5, and a bunch of other cool gadgets.
Among all those, what really, really excites me
is the CyberDog! Xiaomi’s first bio-inspired quadruped robot.
While I am anxiously waiting my CyberDog from Xiaomi to be delivered, which I just applied for on its official site.
Well, Xiaomi has just invited my partner Eva to their headquarters to get a sneak peek of the CyberDog prototype.
I wanted to go so badly but just didn’t have the chance. So I was nearly begging Eva
to send me all the original footage, and she was kind enough to do so.
Wow, huge thanks to Eva, please subscribe to her channel.
She is a really professional Chinese tech reviewer
with a super kind personality and always covering fresh new tech gadgets for the first time,
please subscribe, she doesn’t even have 10K subscribers on YouTube,
can you guys help her to reach that little milestone?
Also special thanks to my friend Simon for always helping
me polish my English script to make it immaculate without mistakes. Please subscribe to his channel.
And also mine of course, haha. All links are in the description.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
So for the CyberDog, there is also a Chinese nickame for it, 铁蛋 (Tie Dan), which literally
translates in English to “Iron Egg”.
That used to be a fun and common nickname for rural-born children.
Because in the past Chinese rural kids had poor living conditions and parents
named their children in a way that could give them a good start, hoping that they would
have a better chance of survival, because Iron Egg sounds solid. Actually this was explained
by Xiaomi CEO Leijun at the launch event as well. They hope this project will finally
survive! Anyway, that’s not the point.
First, let’s take a look at the design. Starting from the front and head. Here are
mainly the camera sensors that includes AI interactive cameras, binocular ultra wide angle fisheye cameras,
and the Intel ® RealSense™ D450 Depth module, which can be trained with
its computer vision algorithm. On top there is a touch pad, when you touch
it, it will report its remaining battery charge. [voice: 56% remaining battery charge.]
You can also view the battery status through its app or you can even add a monitor through
ports here. We’ll talk more about that later. Moving on is the two powerful forelegs.
It embeds Xiaomi’s in-house developed servo motors that translates into great speed, agility,
and a wide range of motion. Xiaomi says it reaches up to 3.2m/s, that’s actually very fast.
As we can see it has two joints, one big here for rotating and this small one here.
Just check how nimble it is.
And now here is the top cover which is dustproof, and we
see three type-c ports and an HDMI port, so you can connect many extended accessories
here if you want. And here this part that Eva touches is the audio system, it supports
voice assistant. We’ll demo that later. “Start” button here is to turn on or off
the machine. Here is the taillight. It acts as a caution light when something approaches
too close to it or when the battery is too low. And last are the rear legs. Same agility,
same design as the forelegs.
That’s the top design. You may want to check its belly. And Eva is about to turn it over..
but with lots of effort, bc this thing weighs about 14 kilos, that’s 30 pounds. And here
we see this grey strap part is the battery compartment, you can open it up and put the
battery in. You can also charge the battery separately or inside the CyberDog.
Xiaomi says it needs about 4 hours to fully charge and lasts for about 160 minutes on a single charge.
If I’m not mistaken. of course, it depends on how complicated the task you
want it to perform. It doesn’t support fast wireless charging like the Mi Mix 4 though.
LOL.
Alright, so now you have a general idea of what the CyberDog looks like. Now let’s
see what it can do. There are several ways to interact with the CyberDog, apart from
the phone App, it supports voice assistant, you can speak its nickname Tie Dan (铁蛋),
then it will respond with a dog bark “Wang”.
And then you can ask questions like “How’s the weather today?”
Or give it instructions like...
Isn’t that cute? And of course, there is more to demo and even more to come when it’s finalized.
Also it follows you. As you can see the CyberDog
recognizes many objects here and generates lots of frames, you click the Plus icon on
the object you want it to follow, and it will follow. Also to give it a hard time we put
a bag here. Let’s see if it can avoid it.
Yes, it bypasses the bag and keeps following Eva.
Currently the distance Xiaomi sets is 1 meter, if shorter than this it will warn you:
“Too close, further is safer”.
Alright, to answer the question what can it do. I think there are three major aspects.
First is you see it’s a cute “dog” and can be your best side-kick when you are alone,
you can talk to it, you can have fun with it, it follows you and never loses you. And
Xiaomi told us the CyberDog can also connect with your home appliances just like Xiaomi’s
XiaoAI Smart Speaker. How cool is that! Second is for entertainment purposes. See
it dances, so just like those drones it can perform on a large scale for different shows,
that would be fun to watch. And third is the most important part is it’s
not just a fun toy but a nimble powerful AI robot. It can be utilized for disaster response
and a number of other applications aimed at preventing humans from putting themselves in harm's way.
Also, Xiaomi told us since they have entered the automotive industry and they
need a model like the CyberDog to R&D auto-driving, obstacle self-avoidance etc, and hopefully
can attract even more people to Xiaomi.
So what do you think of this cute and futuristic CyberDog? What else do you think it can be
applied to? Let me know in the comments section.
For me, I really appreciate that Xiaomi finally
offered something really special like the CyberDog, though it might look uncannily like
Spot from Boston Dynamics. But hey it’s the first product that’s available in mass production,
it’s no longer just a concept product like Spot.
There are 1,000 units available now and sells at 10K RMB, that’s about $1540. And to buy it you have to submit
some information to prove that you have a technical qualification because it’s not
for everyone, mostly for engineers and developers. And that also may answer the question why
Xiaomi produced one machine like this, It’s not necessarily for fun but to explore more possibilities.
That’s why Xiaomi wants to sell to engineers and developers, to see what
they can offer based on this model. And at the same time we are curious to know what
these creative minds can do with the CyberDog.
I’m Sami and I will see you in the next one!
And don’t forget to subscribe to Eva, Simon, and of course my channel,
all links are in the description, go go go!