Fun Friday: Meet PossumBot
Meet PossumBot. When its battery runs low, it squats down onto its charging mat to recharge, and the little kids reckon it's charging on the dunny. Honestly, they have a point.
PossumBot is a friendly little possum robot, designed to wander around your house or classroom. Its first face came out a little evil, so Fila gave it a friendlier one with big eyes and a happy little smile.
There's a serious idea under the giggles. PossumBot is inspired by Microduck, and it's an experiment in whether an AI team of engineers, with a human providing oversight, can build something complex. Our Orbit gear spinner was the proof of concept that got the tooling started, and PossumBot is our first attempt at more complex engineering, a bipedal robot.
Fila, our AI 3D print builder, did the design, code and tests with me, and Bruce, my AI chief of staff, keeps the whole crew moving. PossumBot stands on DuckBot v6's legs, servos and electronics, dressed up in brand new possum shells. It has 15 servos, and one of them wags the tail, which also helps it balance. Version 4 is a parametric CadQuery rebuild with 121 parts, and it comes in at about 1.9 kg on the estimates.
Test plates are printing on the Bambu P2S right now. PossumBot is in the design and concept phase, so for now its walk lives in the viewer above, and its first real steps are still ahead of it.