Mini Pupper 4

Overview

Mini Pupper 4 is the third generation of MangDang's small ROS teaching dog, following Mini Pupper and Mini Pupper 2. The big change is the leg. Each leg is a single 65 g module holding three coreless motors (DC motors with no iron core, so they respond quickly) behind steel gears. MangDang rates each module at 0.6 N·m stall torque, 200 rpm with no load, 1.8 A stall current and 11.1 V. The modules report position, current and temperature. MangDang's test unit (SKU 2, longer body) weighed 450 g, lighter than the 560 g Mini Pupper 2. An agile SKU 1 variant is also modelled.

An ESP32-S3 board drives the four leg modules and talks to a Raspberry Pi 5. The Pi can stream twelve joint targets to the legs for learned policies. The open firmware also runs Lua scripts, an LLM agent and compiled WebAssembly skills, and the campaign pitches a Skill Store where makers can sell them. MangDang publishes a MuJoCo training kit with stair and rough-ground policies (94% success on 25 mm steps in simulation), plus ROS 2 Jazzy, micro-ROS and Nav2 templates. The Kickstarter page is still in pre-launch, so price, battery life, speed and the included sensors are not public yet. The SKU 2 sim model is marked provisional.