Just Horsing Around

Here at Hackster News, we are no strangers to the shenanigans pulled by Dave of the Dave's Armoury YouTube channel. Last year, for example, we reported on a robot that Dave built just to walk across town and pick up some of his favorite doughnuts. That may seem like a seriously over-engineered solution to a minor problem because, well, that is exactly what it is. But what is the harm in that? When working on personal projects, going over the top can be a great way to experiment with new technologies and learn, not to mention have some fun and provide others with a healthy dose of entertainment.

Dave is back again with another unexpected robot that is much more about fun than utility. This time, he was inspired by his Amish and Mennonite neighbors that get around by horse and buggy. But as it turns out, local laws do not allow him to keep horses on his property. So what can a robotics engineer do? I think the answer is pretty clear — build a robotic dog-horse chariot thingy to ride around town in style. Great minds truly do think alike, because that is exactly what Dave decided to do.

Something like this had previously been attempted a few years back by Adam Savage who built what he called the Robot Rickshaw Carriage using a quadrupedal Spot robot dog made by Boston Dynamics. That was a very cool build indeed, but Spot did prove to be a bit underpowered for the application, often struggling to make it up even gently inclined hills.

Dave corrected this problem by building his own project around the much more powerful InDro Robotics B1 quadrupedal robot dog. The B1 is very beefy and can easily trot along even with a 175 pound load on its back. That gives the robot plenty of power to pull a person on a lightweight chariot, even uphill.

Now, driving a horse does not come as natural to Dave as issuing some ROS 2 commands, so after failing to find a steering wheel, pedal, or any other sensible controls, he asked his Amish neighbor to give him a rundown on how to handle the reins. After getting a feel for things, he went back to the workshop to design some custom controls powered by potentiometers that, when connected to reins, would allow the robot to respond just like a trained horse.

These controls were wired into an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit to serve as the control center for the robot. Able to perform 40 trillion operations per second, this may be pretty serious overkill, but it does leave the door open for Dave to add some AI-powered features to the robot in the future.

A local buggy building business was approached about building the chariot, to blend modern technology with traditional Amish handiwork. Clearly impressed by Dave’s work, the shop owner only asked for a picture of the finished robotic horse as payment, so that he could include it in his annual buggy wall calendar. Nice.

To wrap things up, a 3D printed mount was produced to attach the chariot to the robot, then most importantly of all, a horse mask was placed on the robot to officially make it a robot horse. The robotic horse drawn chariot was tested out and looked like it worked great, and also like a ton of fun. But not content to just build the vehicle, Dave also wanted to try and show up the locals, so he challenged a pony named Apples to a race for pinks. Well, maybe it was not really as serious as all of that, but they did race all the same. The winner? The robot took it by a nose, although Apples did not look all that interested. If a few sugar cubes were involved, I think Apples could have run circles around the robot.

In the course of talking with neighbors, Dave found that a real horse would probably just go home if you stopped telling it what to do. The robot cannot do that, of course, but perhaps such a feature would be a good way to put the Jetson Orin Nano to better use?