If you were wondering whether we’d one day live in a world where robot dogs are common, Xiaomi’s new Cyberdog (which, naturally, has to sit in the back of your Cybertruck while you play Cyberpunk) might just be your answer.

See, we’re getting used to the idea of Spot the robot dog but at more than R110,000 a pop, we’ll probably never own one — no matter how well it can dance. Xiaomi’s newly-announced entry into the burgeoning robotic dog market is looking to go a lot more affordable.

Throw a cyberdog a cyberbone here

Let’s get the price out of the way first — the Cyberdog will only cost interested parties (which will include “Xiaomi Fans, engineers, and robotic enthusiasts”, according to the company) 9,999 Yuan. In South African currency, that’s about R23,000 — which is far more likely to find buyers than Spot’s price tag. Probably enough to wipe out the limited run of 1,000 robotic quadrupeds that Xiaomi intends to make first.

For your money, you’re getting a 3kg robot dog that moves at speeds of up to 3.2 metres per second, which is enough to terrify you if it unexpectedly scampers up to you in a parking lot. Xiaomi reckons that it can do backflips and it should navigate around rather well. Touch sensors, GPS, an ultrawide fisheye camera and an Intel RealSense D450 depth camera are inside the Cyberdog and the whole thing runs on Nvidia’s Jetson Xavier AI platform.

Xiaomi says that it can “…analyze its surroundings in real-time, create navigational maps, plot its destination, and avoid obstacles”, while face and posture recognition and voice command support means it’ll actually follow you around like a (well-behaved, but creepy) dog if you want it to. There are three USB-C ports and an HDMI on the unit as well, in case you want to bolt bits onto it to be more of a practical device rather than a canine made from components.

Source: The Verge