Petoi's new products
Bittle X is evolving
Petoi released its newest version of its Bittle X robot, named Bittle X V2. For those unfamiliar with the Petoi Bittle robot… Bittle is a sophisticated programmable quadruped robot, versatile enough to be useful to entertain and educate young kids, be a home companion, as well as, technologically rich enough to be used for Ph.D. level research work. We at Learn With A Robot have used Bittle extensively in many of our tutorials. All our material on Bittle can be found here.
Bittle X V2
Petoi’s introductory email for Bittle X V2 titled “Bittle X is evolving” came out this week. Essentially, Petoi is releasing two flavors of the updated Bittle X. The Bittle X V2 is a slightly updated version of Bittle X. The added features are: (i) An updated ESP32 micro-controller board called the BiBoard V1, (ii) Raspberry Pi support, and (iii) Servos with feedback control.
I had the chance to see a prototype version of the servos with feedback control a few months back. These servos can track and respond to the movement of a paired servo. As an example, if you manually rotate one servo, the paired servo can make a similar movement. This feature can be exploited to do interesting experiments such a making the Bittle move its limbs when you move its arms.
Bittle X V2 With the Robotic ARM gripper
For me, the more exciting release is the Bittle X V2 with the arm gripper. This is a 2 degrees-of-freedom (DoF) arm which fits instead of Bittle’s head. We had briefly discussed the arm in our post a few months back. Petoi’s video on the new arm is the best way to understand this product.
As can be seen from the video, the arm adds two additional degrees of freedom to Bittle, making the robot have 10 DoFs. One servo controls the lateral movement of the arm like the lift of the Anki Vector robot. The other servo works like a gripper. This allows for a wide range of possibilities in programming the Bittle to grip different kinds of objects, and play games. The videos posted by Petoi are indeed a lot of fun. We hope to get our hands on the Bittle X V2 with the arm gripper soon, and will post a detailed post soon. Stay tuned.
If you are interested in either of these two robots, Petoi has a 10% discount at their website till April 13 midnight, in honor of National Robotics Week in the USA. If you are in the USA, the price of these robots might get impacted by the USA-China trade and tariff situation, so now might be good time to buy.
Bittle in research
To give you a flavor of the true potential of the Bittle robot, let us discuss a recent research paper published by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh. The authors developed a biology inspired hierarchical control system to train the Bittle robot on how to switch gaits to move around obstacled. Their design employs a multi-layer neural network: A Central Pattern Generator (CPG) to produce rhythmic motion patterns and a Dynamic State Machine (DSM) capable of learning and adapting new gaits in real time. A video of their work showing Bittle crawl to go under an obstacle is shown below. You can see that the Bittle robot is completely autonomous and driven by a Raspberry Pi mounted on top,which acts as a control framework.
Your favorite Bittle project?
Let me start with mine… it has been trying to train a Reinforcement Learning (RL) policy to make Bittle walk. I wrote about this project here. This project has open-source code that I could use to train a RL policy on Google Colab for free, and then experiment how the policy works when applied to Bittle. This project helped me understand how to shape a reward function for Reiforcement Learning.
Do you have a favorite Bittle project you would like to talk about? Discuss and drop a link in the comments.