Story of Xpider
we have a little kitty in our office, her name is tea, and one day, we are curious what the world looks like from tea’s eyes. So we want to make a small robot with camera, it can help ous to explore the tea’s world.
At the beginning, we are trying to buy some robot kit from ebay, but as you known, most of them looks like the following pictures.
they were not small enough, we need a smaller one and it should be more powerful. And it should be a open source project, since we want to share it with more robot fans. So that's the reason why the Xpider was born. Xpider is the smallest smart robot spider in the world. It used Intel Edison platform which is a tiny pc.
It contains some cool functions. For example, it can be controlled by your mobile phone, it has the camera, can make you watch through the FPV view on the robot, thus you will know what your pets seen. And also the camera can be used for computer vision to recognize some simple geometric pictures even human face.
And I embedded a graphical programming tool in the Edison platform. So you can program this robot yourself. The most funny thing is that you can train this small robot by some simple neural network algorithm. That make you can custom the only one Xipder for yourself.
This is the draft for Xpider project, and we will publish more details in the following days.
Sure, if you want make your own xpider robot, don't hesitate, just following us.
Version Iteration
we found this robot from ebay. It's size is ok for us. So modification is our first choice.
After modification, the robot looks like:
Has there anyone who like the animate named "Ghost in the Shell"? Yes, we try to make it look like the Tachikoma, a fictional artificial intelligence walker/roller in the animate. It's work fine, but not acceptable.
So we maked the second Version.
Since it's first time we try to design our robot, the mechanical structure was not reasonable. It's too heavy, so It's failed.
This is Version III, thin man.
A little bit crazy, lol.
Next section we will release the setup process of the Xpider open source version.
Xpider Project Announcement
Many people are very curious why these two projects are very similar.
Here are the project links:
QPako-My 1st Walking Creature https://www.robotshop.com/letsmakerobots/node/49427
Xpider—the smallest smart robot spider https://www.robotshop.com/letsmakerobots/node/49405
Actually we are the same team.
In the beginning, our team focused on the development of Xpider. As you know, the Xpider is based on the Intel Edison platform, which is a small but powerful computing platform. So We can add more cool function to Edison and make the Xpider more powerful.
But with the development of the project, we were confused, we didn’t know whether customers need the powerful function. So we decided to divide the project into two branches. One branch will still make a powerful and functional Xpider, the other will make a simpler one with Intel Curie platform.
So that’s why there are two projects on the forum. We are sorry to make you confused. And to avoid misunderstanding, we decide to stop using this account “hifanso” to publish projects informations. And account “Xpider” will be used to publish information about Xpider and QPako. And the “Xpider—the smallest smart robot spider https://www.robotshop.com/letsmakerobots/node/49405” project will stop updating and will be transferred into a new project published by account Xpider.
Here is the new project:
Xpider—the smallest smart robot spider
We are very sorry to trouble you, and hope that you can follow us as usual.
Thank you.
explore the world via camera, Programmable, Through narrow places easily, battle with other robots
- Actuators / output devices: 2 motors, one servo
- Control method: Bluetooth, WiFi, Phone, Web browser
- Operating system: Linux
- Power source: 7.4V Lipoly
- Programming language: C++, C, javascript
- Sensors / input devices: IR, ultrasonic, camera
- Target environment: indoor, outdoor, anywere not near water
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/xpider-the-smallest-smart-robot-spider-stop-updating