This LiDAR-equipped, 30-pound robot dog can be yours for $1,600

If Boston Dynamic’s $75,000 robot dog, Spot, is just too wealthy for you, how a few stripped-down client model? The Chinese robotics firm Unitree’s newest robot dog is the Unitree Go 2, which begins at an unimaginable $1,600. After delivery and responsibility charges and all that, it will price extra like $2,400, however that is nonetheless a cut price in comparison with an industrial robot.

Sometimes it is laborious to inform if these upstart robotics corporations are critical and have actual merchandise to promote, however we need to stress this isn’t Unitree’s first robot dog. This is the corporate’s third-generation client product, together with two fashions of beefier “industrial” bots that compete with Boston Dynamics.

Unitree Go 2 stands at just below 16 inches tall, is 27 inches from head to tail, and weighs 33 kilos. It has a digital camera, flashlight, and a always spinning 360-degree LiDAR sensor on the face. The robot has 12 motors—we’re guessing which means three for every leg—making this a reasonably agile robot capable of take care of all kinds of uneven out of doors terrain and, like every good dog, do a ton of tips. The Go2 has an 8000 mAh battery good for about “1–2” hours of runtime, together with Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth for communication with the app. The base mannequin has a high velocity of two.5 meters per second.

A dearer $2,800 “Pro” mannequin provides a speaker and microphone combo for voice instructions, media playback, and intercom capabilities. There’s a “Wireless Vector Positioning Tracking Module” for following instructions, 4G connectivity, a quicker CPU, and a better 3.5 m/s high velocity. There’s additionally a price-unknown “EDU” mannequin, which can hit 5 m/s, and provides a 9A fast-charging system and a 15,000 mAh battery. It additionally has a “Foot-end drive sensor,” which sounds crucial for a few of the tips taking place within the video.

The accompanying video is a nonstop barrage of tips, nevertheless it’s probably not clear which variations of the dog are able to performing them. Some model of this dog can do jumps, flips, stretching, shaking fingers, sitting down, and all kinds of two-footed hopping. It can not solely go up and down steps on 4 legs however can additionally go down steps on two legs whereas doing a handstand.

One factor in regards to the built-in robot voice is that it does not seem to be anybody at Unitree is a local English speaker. The robot dog’s text-to-speech engine shows some actually damaged English in its responses, together with the road, “I’ll dance to pleasure you.” The web site is equally shut to correct English however not fairly there, and all of the spec sheet footnotes are scrambled, making this all slightly laborious to grasp, however we’re attempting our greatest. For occasion, the EDU spec sheet lists “Charging Pile Compatibility”—I believe that implies that’s the one model that can use the charging dock. It additionally helps “Secondary improvement,” which should be some form of programming interface for the robot dog. Some components of the spec sheet are nonetheless in Chinese, like “RTT 2.0 图传,” which apparently means it can ship video to the app.

Because it is a product launched in 2023, in fact, it has ChatGPT integration. About 15 seconds into the video, the proprietor asks the dog to “shake hand” [sic] and the phrase “Automatic code era by way of GPT” pops up on the video, and a few code whizzes by. This appears to recommend the robot dog did not know the very fundamental dog command of “shake,” so it queried ChatGPT for code on how to do this, after which it is simply going to execute that code and hope it really works. I’m skeptical.

By the way in which, there are all kinds of toys and equipment you can purchase for your robot dog. There is an computerized charging dock, however frankly, it appears alarmingly flimsy, even within the promotional video. First, there are two extraordinarily outsized metallic contacts that the robot crouches down to hook up with. The solely construction to the bottom is the thinnest doable milk carton plastic, so the entire thing flexes and flops round when the robot approaches it to kneel down. On the beefier facet of issues, there’s the aluminum robot arm attachment, once more making appear to be a less expensive Spot knockoff.

The robot dog is up for preorder now, however perceive you may get hit with loads of charges to get one in every of these within the US. Shipping is $400, and the location says the US wants so as to add a 25 p.c responsibility cost.

Listing picture by Unitree