It's a fun little toy and I really appreciate what Petoi are doing with the robots & the OpenCat framework! However... due to either a design flaw or my own subtle mistake in assembling it (haven't identified which yet), the poor cat's tail is too long! It hits the floor and topples the bot over!

It’s pretty cool :)

About time to build Teddy from the movie "AI".

> QUGVs are primarily beneficial for educational purposes…

But it still beneficial to give a heads up for anyone before investing efforts and time that QUGVs are simply for these purposes, which is something you can see in some comments in here, personally, I would invest those efforts in drones but YMMV.

Objective: robot cat.

Output: robot cat.

Seems like everyone is getting what they want and you're just inserting a random pedantic critique.

"I want to build a robot cat"

"What you really want to build is a drone because quadrupeds cannot go downstairs backwards"

UAVs are highly susceptible to wind and drift, especially indoors with no GPS, and while DJIs collision avoidance is pretty good, any land based vehicle won't (fatally) crash if it touches anything.

The critical consideration is that movement is dangerous, under conditions of pervasive battlefield surveillance, so when it is possible at all it must be exploited to its full potential, and thus can be conducted via an expensive process such as flight. In turn, to make movement dangerous to the enemy, one must make terrain frictionful to cross, through high lethality, low detectability assets, of which mines are the paradigmatic example.

[0] Brief bursts of flight interwoven between slow stalking of different ground locations for worms.

How would you counter? Up-armoured bipedal robots with roughly human-shaped heat-signatures is the only thing that would defeat easily-implemented automatic counter-measures. But if the "minefield" is under surveillance + command and control, then that goes right out the window. Besides, the cost-benefit (let alone logistics) is firmly in favor of the defender's "robins". I suspect attackers will try jamming signals and then send in the meatshields.

Ugh.

(If not that, a small nuke can generate enough heat and gamma rays to burn everything near the point of the blast, but the military escalation hasn't reached this point just yet.)

I had another thought. There's a tried and tested method for knocking down bird-sized moving objects. So, what about shotguns? (Yes, I know they're currently banned for combat use. I think something like this would override that, at least de facto.)

With something cheaper that you spread around. Drone grenades?

OMG, WTF!

I think much of the cost is a good motor now? There were startups trying to make this but I think they are closed [1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190104173241/http://www.simple...

https://unitreerobotics.net/robotdog/unitree-go1-pro/

You could get a decent computer and a robot dog for a price of Mac Pro.

Incidentally, if anyone can share similiar efforts or kid ready sets, I would love to hear about it.

I am starting to think we may be able to get into this together.

In https://github.com/PetoiCamp/OpenCat-Old/issues/7, the creator admits that the "nyboard" (https://docs.petoi.com/nyboard/overview) at the heart of their robots is derived from Arduino, but insists that they don't need to comply with the licensing terms for derivative boards (https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L...) because Arduino is unlikely to sue them.

"I initially built the prototype with an Arduino board. Later I got my friends designing the NyBoard, a customized PCB based on ATmega328P. We will release the BiBoard, another board based on ESP32. They both support the Arduino IDE but are not using Arduino's brand"

If anything, I've found that the faster I reject due to dark patterns, the better off and more informed I am. If something is truly worth learning about, it will bubble up again elsewhere soon enough.

Making a judgement on what to spend time on is literally the thing that allows for it to happen. Otherwise my time would be spent on shit.

I feel the point was a valid red flag. This org may be more interested in marketing itself than it is in supporting open source.

Looking at their repos, we find that the designs for their robots are not public. This company is using the open core / artificial scarcity model for their hardware, while presenting themselves as a fully open source organization.

This is an organization exploiting open source for its marketing, without supporting open hardware.

This is important: Contributors looking for a real open hardware project to work on should consider looking elsewhere. If they contribute to this project, they would be contributing to a partially proprietary ecosystem. This tends to compromise the promise of Open hardware, which includes low cost replication and iteration on hardware designs.

Tldr: when an open source organization practices dark patterns, people need to hear about it. It's not a minute fact- it's a major compromise of Open source values and outcomes.

In seriousness this is really cool! I wish I had this in school for robotics learning.

sigh if you want to build a robot, build one. Quit calling them cats and dogs. The marketing is cheezy.

And well, even when liquid the nitrogen sufficient to flood an their normal room would only cost like 1~5$. And it carries reasonably in basically just 5~10l versions of those fact insulated tea/coffee bottles for being on the go and having hot tea when making a stop after say 5 hours.

So yeah, essentially, it shouldn't cost more than 200~300$ during the entire lifetime to have appropriate medical supervision for a normal cat. More than that is due to either greedy vets or cat owners who spend a lot on fancy healthcare to get a few extra years of lifespan for their cat. But from a pure financial POV, most of that isn't worth it: generic cats are very not hard to breed/multiply.