OpenCat: Open-source robotic pet quadruped framework

You are not wrong either, hence why I said

> QUGVs are primarily beneficial for educational purposes…

But it still beneficial to give a heads up for anyone before investing efforts and time that QUGVs are simply for these purposes, which is something you can see in some comments in here, personally, I would invest those efforts in drones but YMMV.

You think these robots are good for pest control ?

Tell that to my cat, at least if you consider anything up to the size of a small pillow a load!

Well, not when we want them to...

"Hopping drones", with movement akin to the hunting method of robins [0], will be used as a kind of living minefield in military operations. When anti-air is absent/suppressed, they will engage in high energy aerial maneuvers to cover as much ground, with as little contest, as possible. Once emplaced, they will lower their signature and engage in low energy defensive fire/ambush behaviors, to hold territory.

The critical consideration is that movement is dangerous, under conditions of pervasive battlefield surveillance, so when it is possible at all it must be exploited to its full potential, and thus can be conducted via an expensive process such as flight. In turn, to make movement dangerous to the enemy, one must make terrain frictionful to cross, through high lethality, low detectability assets, of which mines are the paradigmatic example.

[0] Brief bursts of flight interwoven between slow stalking of different ground locations for worms.

That’s because you are not following the industry; denied-GNSS navigation has been a thing for a while. I have also seen several drone designs that can attach themselves to the silo steel wall from the inside for inspection jobs. UAVs aren’t perfect; their biggest drawback is the battery endurance before jumping to an airplane scale, but they are effective, efficient, and reliable for all their applications, even more than UGVs (UGVs have been used in real-life applications since the 90s or even before, yet drones took over in the last decade). QUGVs, on the other hand, are merely a toy, for education, or marketing purposes. The only purpose I can see for QUGVs, or even UGVs in the future, is interoperability with drones, but definitely, drones are and will be the dominant force in the field for the future.

WDIMR?!?

Ok. That is cool. You were not kidding about gauging though. Geez. I might need to shop around and hope I can grab one at a reasonable price. Amusingly, kid got super excited about the arm.

I am starting to think we may be able to get into this together.

More disposable and with better aim. Seriously this is a huge problem. It took no time at all for Ukraine to weaponize commercial UAVs. An open source mobile gunning platform? Throw in LTE and some solar panels and this thing is an assassin's dream. Could be used anonymously. Could sit in wait for 5 years I'd wager

Ah so we have free as in speech, free as in beer, and free as in shoplifted.

It's standard business tactics to stretch the use of words until they are no longer recognisable.

I instinctively closed the popup, so I have no idea what I just agreed to...

Do you feel that a focus on dismissing and defending dark patterns is appropriate or constructive? What world are you helping construct, and what values are you supporting? Are you aiming for a world where open hardware becomes dominant and beneficial?

I feel the point was a valid red flag. This org may be more interested in marketing itself than it is in supporting open source.

Looking at their repos, we find that the designs for their robots are not public. This company is using the open core / artificial scarcity model for their hardware, while presenting themselves as a fully open source organization.

This is an organization exploiting open source for its marketing, without supporting open hardware.

This is important: Contributors looking for a real open hardware project to work on should consider looking elsewhere. If they contribute to this project, they would be contributing to a partially proprietary ecosystem. This tends to compromise the promise of Open hardware, which includes low cost replication and iteration on hardware designs.

Tldr: when an open source organization practices dark patterns, people need to hear about it. It's not a minute fact- it's a major compromise of Open source values and outcomes.

Not OP, but I do the same, and no, not in the least. The amount of information available, even filtering for the best of the best by whatever heuristic I can choose, is vastly larger than my ability to process as a single person.

If anything, I've found that the faster I reject due to dark patterns, the better off and more informed I am. If something is truly worth learning about, it will bubble up again elsewhere soon enough.

I feel, personally, that 'signs of quality' are one of the best metrics an individual can have for making a decision to spend time on something.

Making a judgement on what to spend time on is literally the thing that allows for it to happen. Otherwise my time would be spent on shit.

No. There's so much content fighting for my (limited) attention that there is no loss to ignore user-hostile sites.

And it never destroys anything.

But live cat ships with much better software. It’s not close.

which, That medical help can get expensive. Not that I expect robot cat technician appointments are.gonna be cheap either.

Depending on where you are you're can do the former outside, with you feeding in the off-season and that, and the latter is perspective: you don't _need_ more than vaccinations and depending on how they eventually end up, possibly euthanization. But those shouldn't be that expensive, really. Anti-suffering advocates caused the process of slaughter for general farmed meat animals to get researched a lot, so that now we know fairly well how to kill a tame animal without causing suffering. IIRC the one requiring the least skill and least likely to accidentally cause great suffering is the "inert gas asphyxiation", i.e., displacing the air in the poorly ventilated space the animal is in with commonly nitrogen, until the Oxygen concentration drops so low the brain just passes out. We know from many pilots who fucked up how humans experience oxygen deprivation to the extend that your copilot already passed out. The become loopy, incoherent, but notably not with memories of when asked during it that they feel bad/suffering.

And well, even when liquid the nitrogen sufficient to flood an their normal room would only cost like 1~5$. And it carries reasonably in basically just 5~10l versions of those fact insulated tea/coffee bottles for being on the go and having hot tea when making a stop after say 5 hours.

So yeah, essentially, it shouldn't cost more than 200~300$ during the entire lifetime to have appropriate medical supervision for a normal cat. More than that is due to either greedy vets or cat owners who spend a lot on fancy healthcare to get a few extra years of lifespan for their cat. But from a pure financial POV, most of that isn't worth it: generic cats are very not hard to breed/multiply.