In before ...
the inevitable "Ubuntu runs like a dog" jokes.
Linux fans rejoice: the smarts running behind Xiaomi's Not-Spot, CyberDog, emanate from none other than Ubuntu 18.04. The Register asked Canonical why not something a little fresher, such as 20.04, and were told by robotics product manager, Gabriel Aguiar Noury, that "the operating system is running 18.04 rather than 20.04 …
Speaking of copying
China’s Communist Party took American democracy to task on Saturday, sharply criticizing a global democracy summit being hosted by President Joe Biden next week and extolling the virtues of its governing system.
Party officials questioned how a polarized country that botched its response to COVID-19 could lecture others, and said that efforts to force others to copy the Western democratic model are “doomed to fail.”[AP]
... looks an awful lot like Boston Dynamic's Spot, replete with those backward knees
I believe that in their effort to make Spot vaguely dog-like they forgot to give it knees at all. The thing about dogs (and cats and other 4 legged animals) is a lot of people think their knees are backwards, but in fact the prominent joint is the equivalent of an ankle in a human. AFAIK all land mammals have their knees in the same orientation as humans. Obviously seals and cetacea are built a bit differently, but I understand some of them also have vestigial leg bones in the same orientation but don't have hips so they are disconnected from the spine and thus useless as limbs.
It's a terminology thing. The correct terms for quadruped rear limbs are "stifle" for the equivalent of the human knee, and "hock" for the equivalent of the ankle, then fetlock (heel) for the next one down. For the front limbs, the elbow is up near the chest and the knee is the equivalent of the human wrist. The horsy world still seems to use the proper words, as I suppose do veterinarians.
>Xiaomi has released 1,000 units at a price of $1,540
Blatant dumping, no? Copy the code(*) from your competitors, developed over decades, undercut with MASSIVE CPP-provided subsidies, corner the market and steal all the jobs.
(*https://hypebeast.com/2020/1/boston-dynamics-spot-robot-open-source-code)
Boston Dynamics opened their code with the goal to broaden potential uses and aid development. The CPP response is annihilate any fruition of that growth outside of China.