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If you were around during the 2000s, there's a good chance you've seen one of those cute robot dog toys. It felt like a natural evolution of how things were going; kids loved the little digital tamagochi pets, so it only made sense that people would go equally feral over a full-blown robot dog. And while I have no idea if they sold well or not, they still made enough of a cultural impact for us to remember fondly decades later.
Well, now we have all the hardware ourselves to make our own robot dogs. We have the wires, we have 3D printing, and to keep it all moving, we have cheap SBCs at our disposal. And if you're unsure if it can be done, Cucumber is a perfect example of what you can achieve with a little ingenuity.
Cucumber is a DIY robot dog that runs off a Raspberry Pi Pico
As spotted by Hackaday, this awesome robot dog was the idea of Ananya Jajodia, Laurence Lai, and Shao Stassen as part of their university's final project. Here's how they describe it:
We built Cucumber, a quadruped robot pet powered by the Raspberry Pi Pico W, designed to move, pose, follow people, and respond to user commands. It combines DC motors for locomotion, servos for expressive poses, ultrasonic sensors for autonomous following, an OLED display for visual feedback, and a speaker for synthesized dog sounds using DDS. A custom web interface hosted by the Pico W allows users to control movement, pose, sound, and mode over Wi-Fi. The entire system runs on dual-core concurrency with protothreads for smooth, real-time responsiveness.
As part of the project, the students wanted to avoid just making a soulless husk of a dog. They went the extra mile to ensure that it "felt more like a companion than just a machine," meaning using the hardware available to them to create something that people can interact and play with.
English (US) ·