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MarsCat is the world’s first bionic pet cat developed by Elephant Robotics, aiming to be a home robot, a robotic pet to comfort you and surprise you. Just like a real cat, MarsCat is fully autonomous. No extra instruction is needed to control its movements.
It is fully responsive and has sensitive interactions. It can feel your touch, hear your voice, see your face and play with toys. Every MarsCat is unique from its eyes, body to personality, its personality will change according to the way you pet it. With powerful quad-core Raspberry PI, you can also program it easily and give it endless possibilities.
MarsCat can also be an ideal choice for education, research and commerce.
MarsCat Surprises You
You will never know what MarsCat will do next because it is like a real cat, fully autonomous. MarsCat acts independently without any instructions. MarsCat walks, runs, sleeps, sits, stretches, bites nails, kneads and even buries litter although she won’t produce any waste.
It may express different emotions by different meows or gestures. Sometimes it may do some amazing things that surprise you and make your day!
16 servo motors to make MarsCat more bionic
MarsCat Delights You
MarsCat is a good companion, it is fully responsive and interactive. It can play with you or your toys because it can feel, hear and see. Touch its head, chin or back to find out how it will react! It can also interact with objects or people nearby, even play with real cats.
Feel: You can touch its head, jaw and back or even hug it.
Hear: You can talk to MarsCat to order it to walk or come to you, but it will not always follow your command, it has its own feeling.
See: MarsCat will see you or see its own toys. MarsCat can play Teasers (by moving object recognition), Toy-ball, Toy-fish or find its own bed.
MarsCat is Shaped by You
MarsCat is unique from its eyes, body to personality. MarsCat has 6 characters which can be changed. She may be enthusiastic or aloof, energetic or lazy, social or shy. Her personality develops through the way you pet her.
The factors that express MarsCat’s personality:
- Frequency of speaking
- Enthusiastic or not when having interaction
- Frequency of movement
- The tone of sounds…
MarsCat will be more enthusiastic if you interact with her more, be more talkative if you talk to it more…
MarsCat is Redefined by You
MarsCat is open-sourced, we use 4 main threads to process: Vision (qr_code, object_recognition, face_recognition and moving object recognition), Voice (command and volume DB), Sensors (gyro sensor, touch sensor and distance sensor) and AI (process all data and do the output actions). The action will include movements of 16 motors and kinematics + eye-display + sound effects.
You can customize your own MarsCat's eyeball with regular eye color / a blink / a heart / a lightning or anything you like. The API is quite easy to use. Just drop a 128x128 png/jpg file will work.
You can program MarsCat easily and make it with endless possibilities. With powerful quad-core Raspberry Pi, you can create your own applications. MarsCat is also an ideal choice for education, research and commerce.
- We are preparing a wireless charger for MarsCat now! MarsCat will have its own bed "charging station". (First version of the rendering for your reference)
- For all MarsCat's designers, you can now find MarsCat's open-source code from here → https://github.com/elephantrobotics/marsai
- We have made an improvement of MarsCat's tail, the tail will be changed to a rubber coverage, more flexible one.
With MarsCat SDK, you will have access to a huge amount of sensors and actuators at the same time to fulfil your own Cat applications. Also, Protocol and library are open-source embedded in Raspberry PI. Everyone can build their own function of cat for education and commercial usage.
The sensors/ actuators you can access includes:
- Camera
- Camera - face, QR code and object recognition
- Voice Mic
- Voice - Commands recognition
- TOF distance laser sensor
- Multiple Capacitance Touch sensor
- All 16 servo motors: control angles, speed, torque, ID, and receive the data
- Sounds - as you want
- 2 x OLED display on the eye
MarsCat will be open sourced after this campaign. We choose to open source because we think every people could be the creator of this new creature, you can customize any functions or applications yourself. Helping everyone enjoy Robots World is what we dream to do.
The brain of vertebrates consists of the forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain. Animals receive different stimulations (endocrine system) and release different hormones into the blood to influence the body and behaviour through its central nervous system.
As a bionic cat, in ethology, MarsCat should not only sense like a real cat but also behave like a real one. So classical artificial intelligence is used in MarsCat. It enabled the sequence from the sensor to action.
Like a real cat. It has different characters and personalities. Some cats are vivacious, while some are lazy. Some cats are aloof while some are more close to humans. Also, some cats are super curious and they meow frequently.
MarsCat is built to allow you to shape its personalities. More interactions with MarsCat will impel it to be more close to you. More conversations with MarsCat will impel it to meow to you often. Every time you touch it, talk to it or even let it see you, will change its personality.
Industrial DesignWe wanted Mars to be an approachable and instantly likeable companion, full of character. However, designing a robotic cat is no easy task. Under its skin, Mars is packed with electronics, motors, gears, batteries, sensors, displays and a structural skeleton with joints.
All of this adds up to some very challenging space and movement constraints that had to be considered when trying to design a friendly feline exterior.
Our starting point in the industrial design process was the initial form factor and technical envelope, coupled with studies of other toy and cartoon cats, as well as the anatomy of real cats. We went through many iterations of the industrial design, often doing multiple design studies for key parts to evaluate the technical performance as well as the visual proportions and expression.
Once we had honed in on a general shape we felt comfortable with, we started looking at the finer details and massaging the design. We also worked hard to reduce the number of visible parts and carefully manage any split lines and assembly features.
Since Mars is essentially one fixed shape, we have developed different colour and pattern schemes to offer users differentiation and customization opportunities.
ManufacturingSince we are a robotic company and we supply automation solutions to customers in the past 4 years. So we decide to produce the MarsCat on
our own, and plan to use our robotic arms to manufacture MarsCat in the future.
- MarsCat will be available on Feb 25, 2022, at the shop. https://shop.elephantrobotics.com/.
- To get a 10% discount on MarsCat, please leave your email to receive the notifications at https://forms.gle/Jimr2YfFh5LZBaTU6.
- There will be a time-limited discount code sent to you on Feb 25, 2022, which expires on March 8, 2022.
- Previous Demo Tests
Test 1: rotation of each angle
Test 2: walk and run
Test 3: simulation
Test 4: self balance
Test 5: sharpen claws
Test 6: sit down+wave hands
Test 7: knead
Test 8: stretch
Test 9: a series of movement
MarsCat Factory
In JAN 2022, Joey Song (the CEO of Elephant Robotics), along with Jimmy Lai(the CEO of M5Stack) and 高須正和(Twitter), visited MarsCat factory to give some producing tips and inspect the working conditions.
Elephant Robotics is a technology firm specializing in the design and production of robotics, development and applications of operating systems and intelligent manufacturing services in the industry, commerce, education, scientific research, home and etc.
On a mission to “Enjoy Robots World”, Elephant Robotics has independently developed Collaborative Robots (Elephant Robotics®P/C/E Series) and Bionic Robots (MarsCat).
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