We opened up something fun ahead of the Kickstarter launch: you can design your own color scheme for Quaddle at qd.petoi.com, and the ones getting the most votes may actually go into production.
If your color scheme is selected, it becomes an official Quaddle color, and you're credited as the designer where possible.
Curious what colors you would go with.
Turns out you don't need active adhesion (vacuum, electromagnets) for ceiling locomotion — passive permanent magnets in Quaddle open source robot's foot tips are enough, as long as the gait is designed for holding contact upside down instead of just an inverted version of the ground-walking gait.
The interesting part wasn't the magnets, it was the gait — same open source robotics platform OpenCat, same 4 servos, just a different motion profile. Planning to open source this gait's code before it ships too, so anyone curious can adapt it, not just read about it.
Anyone else working on non-standard locomotion modes (climbing, inverted, whatever) — what ended up being the hardest part for you?
Been testing how much mechanical diversity I can get out of Quaddle robot by changing the attachment instead of adding more actuators. Same 4 servos and the same OpenCat firmware the whole time — what changes is the attachment (3D-printed, mostly) and which gait is loaded for it:
- Biped: printed base clips on, switches to two-legged walking
- Tricycle: printed wheel mount + a bearing wheel, front legs go passive and drag
- Bar-spin: printed grippers clip onto a bar, full 360° rotation gait
- 4WD: wheel kit replaces all 4 legs, standard car driving
- Water-paddle: printed footpads, paddling gait (works, though we've sunk it twice)
This is pre-release — not in production yet, but I wanted to share this fun experiment since keeping the servo count fixed while switching locomotion modes was a fun constraint to design around. The gait codes and the 3D-printed parts will be open sourced.
Happy to go into Quaddle's gait/kinematics details in the comments if anyone's curious.
We brought our robot quadrupeds (Bittle X, Quaddle and Nybble Q) to Summer Stack 2026, a STEAM/art fair at Faction Brewing in Alameda, California (Aug 1), and some neighborhood dogs went haywire.
Anyone want to take a guess at what breed each of these dogs is? I don't actually know.
Digital AI that only lives on a screen isn't the same as learning Physical AI hands-on. That's what this clip's about, and it's basically a highlight reel of why Quaddle's a good way to actually do that:
Open-source quadruped. Voice commands, AI you can program. Walks on ceilings (magnetic mount, not a trick), runs on code. 90+ built-in skills, real-time balancing and recovery. Puppet Mode — record a move by hand, it replays it. Raspberry Pi and ROS-ready when you want to go further than any of that.
Built on the OpenCat robotics platform: 20+ academic papers, 30,000+ robots shipped.
It's also built as an educational robot kit — there will be curriculum support baked in if you actually want to teach Physical AI with it, not just watch it.
Still a teaser ahead of the Kickstarter launch in August.
If you had one on your desk, what's the first thing you'd try to teach it or build on top of it?
Hey r/Petoi, — meet Quaddle, the newest quadruped.
Same OpenCat platform as Bittle/Nybble, still a 4-legged robot pet, but a new open-source desk robot design — just 4 servos, way more tricks than that should allow. Build it, tap it and it reacts, teach it a move by hand and it remembers, it finds its own balance, and it talks back with voice AI. Shells/mounts are 3D-printable, and it's fully programmable — Python, MicroPython, C++, or block coding.
30,000+ robots shipped to 60+ countries since 2018 — Quaddle's next, and you're seeing it first. Video above's just a teaser; more is coming before the Kickstarter launch in August, and we'll post it here as it happens.
Quaddle early access is open now if you want to reserve a spot.
Curious what you think of it, and what you'd want to see it do next. Happy to answer questions below.
Meet Quaddle. 🐾
While Norway is rowing in the World Cup quarterfinal against England, Quaddle's doing its own tricks — land, water, desk, wherever.
Kickstarter launching soon. Stay tuned for early access.
3-part series by sentdex walking through the whole thing: evaluating Isaac Sim for an affordable Bittle open source robot dog, training a locomotion policy with RL, then deploying to the physical robot.
Part 1 is basically "is this even worth attempting on consumer hardware" — spoiler, yes.
Part 2 digs into the actual RL training inside Isaac Sim — he uses TD3 and shares the full repo, so you can follow along.
By part 3 the thing is walking on a treadmill. Not perfectly, but it transfers.
Full playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQVvvaa0QuDenVbxP4LXYZoGbjfgP-Y5i
Two weeks ago we brought Bittle X, Bittle X+Arm, and Nybble Q to the Robot Zoo + Science Slam at Tinker Coop, a community makerspace in Berkeley. Kiddies who had never touched these robots before controlled them via mobile app and micro:bit controller.
No lesson plan. No structured activity. Just free play.
Within 60 seconds they'd invented interactions we never designed for — riding robots on other robots, triggering backflips, watching a robot self-right after being knocked over. The stress testing was relentless. Every robot survived.
What struck me: the kids who engaged most deeply weren't necessarily the ones with prior coding experience. They were the ones who weren't afraid to try something that might break.
The robots run on OpenCat — open-source, programmable via Python, C++, or block-based coding. Source: github.com/PetoiCamp/OpenCat
Has anyone here used quadruped robots in a classroom or informal learning setting? Curious what structured vs unstructured approaches worked best.