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Product Description

Petoi Bittle: A Palm-sized Robot Dog

Description

Petoi Bittle is a tiny but powerful robot that can play tricks like real animals. You can bring Bittle to life by assembling its puzzle-like frame and downloading our demo codes on GitHub. You can also teach it new skills to win prizes in our community challenges. Bittle makes a perfect tool for learning, teaching, researching, or a surprising gift to impress your family and friends. However, Bittle is not a toy for small kids. We recommend parental guidance to appreciate its rich content and avoid damage or injury.

Evolving with an open-source gene, Bittle is an open platform to fuse multiple makers' gadgets into one organic system. With our customized Arduino board coordinating all instinctive and sophisticated movements, you can clip various sensors to add perception. You could also inject artificial intelligence capabilities by mounting a Raspberry Pi or other AI chips via wired/wireless connections.

It's a pleasure to assemble and disassemble Bittle for teaching or maintenance. On average, it takes about one hour to put together the body from scratch.

Each piece has gone through tens of iterations with 3D printing. The team then use high strength injection-molded plastic to provide the best protection from collision and dust (it's NOT waterproof!). In the stress tests, the assembled robot can take an adult's stepping without breaking any components (do NOT try this at home!).

They also designed Bittle to be soft. Besides the elasticity of the material, the spring-loaded upper legs flatten the shock on joint servos to protect their gears. Bittle usually survives regular collisions. In the extreme cases, it will disintegrate at the designated "weak link in the chain", which is easy and cheap to reinstall or replace.

Hardware overview

Main components：

Here are the main components you can see when you look at Bittle:

servos in every joint, that needs to be moved, namely shoulder and hip joints and head pan joint
battery installed under the belly
mainboard with control chip and some modules under black cover

Servos

The team use nine P1S servos to actuate Bittle. Eight of them are for walking joints, and one is for head panning. They will also include one spare servo for replacement, as brushed motors are consumable after a certain period of wearing.

Battery

The team designed a Li-ion battery pack with a built-in charging and protection circuit. It can slide into the track underneath Bittle and tune its center of mass. It can power Bittle for at least one hour of continuous walking. It also has an RGB LED to indicate the battery's status.

Mainboard

Bittle is driven by NyBoard V1, a customized Arduino board with rich peripherals. We fully utilized the chip of a regular Arduino Uno to coordinate sophisticated motions. The board can drive at least 12 PWM servos, and an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) is used for balancing. It stores "muscle memory" and detects body status (orientation and acceleration) for balancing. We provide an infrared remote to trigger basic movements. The board also listens to string commands from the serial port, such as "walk", "sit", or more detailed instructions for individual joints.