Free Republic

A hilarious video, recently shared on Reddit, captures the priceless reactions of two huskies when they come face-to-face with the Unitree Go2 Robodog. This remarkable canine creation, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the famous Boston Dynamics dog (just saying), had the pleasure of meeting a few of its living counterparts, and let's just say, some of them were less than thrilled.

In 2017, we first wrote about the Chinese startup Unitree Robotics, which had the goal of “making legged robots as popular and affordable as smartphones and drones.” Relative to the cost of other quadrupedal robots (like Boston Dynamics’ $74,000 Spot), Unitree’s quadrupeds are very affordable, with their A1 costing under $10,000 when it became available in 2020. This hasn’t quite reached the point of consumer electronics that Unitree is aiming for, but they’ve just gotten a lot closer: now available is the Unitree Go1, a totally decent looking small size quadruped that can be yours for an astonishingly low $2700....

In 1939, a robot dog was killed while chasing a car. Really. Sometimes you stumble across a piece of history that is too good not to follow up on. Sparko, the robot dog, is one such piece of history. Prepared for the World's Fair in 1939, he got out of his pen, chased a car, and was killed. No fooling. Androids may dream of electronic sheep, but people have dreamed, for decades, of electronic dogs. Robots, a threatening concept, became much less frightening when put in the form of man's best friend. This relationship turned out quite satisfying for people...