Robots shaped like animals are everywhere. Festo created kangaroos, bats, and fish. On the Boston Dynamics side, it's hard to forget SpotMini and its colleagues. All of them are highly advanced developments, with entire years of work and resources invested. But if you want to build one, you actually can. The openDog project by James Bruton goes exactly in that direction, offering instructions, technical details, CAD models, and open source code.
Building a home robot seems like a titanic task, but it depends on the final goal. Some robots just go from point A to point B. Others pick objects, push them, or simply avoid them. And the best part is there's plenty of room for improvisation. I've seen projects that recycle printer parts or squeeze the most out of Arduino controllers. However, some robots operate on a completely different level. A good example is Handle from Boston Dynamics, which can move, balance, and adapt to multiple obstacles without sacrificing speed, but this company is better remembered for its robotic dogs. That said, how does building one from scratch sound?
The openDog Project
If you're interested, it all starts by watching the video playlist that the youtuber, toy designer, and electromechanical engineer James Bruton published about openDog, an open source robot dog. Needless to say, openDog is not easy to digest, as each video averages 20 minutes. But unlike other similar projects in the past, James decided not to build his openDog "on the fly", but instead started with a precise design in Autodesk Fusion 360. In the second video, he already designs the first prototype of the legs and joints, all the way to the seventh video, which includes the installation of the entire electronic system.
Open Source and Community
openDog has accumulated more than three months of work, and if you want to see the material available so far, just visit his official GitHub profile. Being an open source design, any enthusiast can freely reproduce openDog and even take it to market, as long as they share all modifications made to the original code.
