What 30k robot dogs taught me about degrees of freedom, shipping a real product

10 years ago, I built that 14-DoF (degrees of freedom) OpenCat prototype in my university dorm room. Since the Nybble campaign in 2018, we've shipped more than 30, 000 quadrupeds.

I want to walk through: - What the difference really is between a demo and a delivered product - How those units are actually used, and what they did to our support desk - A simple formula I ended up deriving, plotting a product's feasibility against its active DoF How that formula turned into a robot with only 4 servos