Allison interviews Xiaohu “Tiger” Kang, CFO and Co-founder of Hengbot, about a prototype of their robotic dog, Sparky. This is a small, highly dynamic robot that moves in a lifelike manner. It has multiple interaction modes, such as walking in any direction, swimming, jumping, and dancing. Sparky has been designed for secondary development with a rich API and hardware interface. Sparky will become available through a Kickstarter project in the first half of 2025.
Learn more at https://hengbot.com
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Transcript of Interview:
Allison: We’ve got a tiny little robot dog down here on the ground and I’m here with Tiger Kang to tell us all about it.
Tiger Kang: Yeah, hello. This is our robot dog, our self-made thing and we put all our characters on it. So it could be your home robot pet or for entertainment or something else.
Allison: The dog’s rolling its head around. It’s running. Oh wow, that’s really articulated.
Tiger Kang: Yeah, very flexible to move in motion. And we put lots of works on it and we have pre-set some motion groups like this.
Allison: Can we go down here?
Tiger Kang: Yeah, of course. Wave hands and like just like this or sit down and see how it moves.
Allison: The dog just sat. By the way, this is audio only too, so I’m going to narrate a little bit more. Oh, this dog moves in every direction. Really flexible directions.
Tiger Kang: All kinds of directions like this one. It can be front or backward, left side or right side. So both is OK. And the motion will be rather flexible to move.
Allison: Wow, that is a lot of actuators.
Tiger Kang: Yeah, that’s true.
Allison: Does it have a camera on it?
Tiger Kang: We didn’t put a lot of camera system on it.
Allison: On the front it’s glass?
Tiger Kang: Yeah, it’s just an animation like that. We are pretending it has one. Maybe we will put the cameras in the future, but right now it didn’t practice on this prototype.
Allison: This is just for fun, right? We’re just having a good time?
Tiger Kang: Mainly it’s for the entertainment, but we could also offer it to the developers so they can use it as a platform to put their AI modules or some software on it and to make it their own robot.
Allison: OK, and are you going to be, will this be out to the general market?
Tiger Kang: Yeah, of course. We will be coming soon at March or April this year.
Allison: Do you have any idea of a price point for it?
Tiger Kang: It’s about several hundred, I think. Five to six, we have not decided yet.
Allison: Five to six hundred?
Tiger Kang: Yeah, a hundred dollars.
Allison: That’s not that bad. All right, thank you very much.
Tiger Kang: Yeah, don’t worry. Thank you. Thank you for the interview.
Allison: Where would people go to see this?
Tiger Kang: It will go on the Kickstarter for the first one and we will go to the Amazon or some e-trading platform after that.
Allison: OK, so we’ll keep our eyes out for Davie Robot.
Tiger Kang: You can continue to follow with us.
Allison: Thank you.