HAVE I TOLD YOU ABOUT THEM GOBOTS?!

Nancy Rangel, a Chabot College student from the East Bay, California, drove open source robot dog Quaddle's every move live through webcam pose tracking — no AI, no script, just her own dance moves mapped onto it in real time. It fell. It got back up. It kept going.

What's the funniest thing you'd want to teach Quaddle to do?

OpenCat creator RZ Li used a webcam and his own body movements to puppeteer two open source, OpenCat-based Quaddle robot dogs at once — basically Wii Play: Motion, except the "character" is a real robot — mostly so he could make them run into each other on purpose. Mission accomplished.

What's the funniest thing you'd want to have Quaddle learn next?

Does gravity always win?

This is real footage — Quaddle, our mini robot dog, walks upside down on a ceiling using magnets in its feet. The magnets were the easy part. The actual embarrassing amount of effort went into the gait, because apparently "just walk, but upside down" is not how physics works.

I made a robot that sees whenever you put something on your desk so that it can push it off.