Petoi’s Quaddle Hits Kickstarter: a 4-Servo Desk Dog from $99
Petoi opened Kickstarter for Quaddle on 2 September 2026 (US Pacific Time): a palm-scale quadruped kit that walks, strafes, and spins in place on four servos. The product page calls it the first 4-servo omnidirectional quadruped kit, and it starts at a $99 super-early-bird price for the Builder model.
The company is the same US team behind Bittle and Nybble. Petoi says it has shipped 30,000+ robots to 60+ countries since founder Dr. Rongzhong Li published OpenCat in 2016.
Three kits, one mechanical trick
Quaddle’s legs use a retro-mechanical linkage so one motor drives a full knee lift. That is how Petoi keeps the servo count at four. The product page lists three models, all no-solder kits on OpenCat, with block coding, Python, C++, and ROS:
- Builder: 90+ walks and tricks, Raspberry Pi Zero socket, Arduino/ESP32, LEGO-compatible shell. Super early bird $99; model-card MSRP $149. The FAQ lists Builder MSRP as $139.
- Buddy: Builder plus open-domain AI chat, touch reactions, and hand-guided Learn & Replay. Super early bird $139; MSRP $219.
- Scout: Buddy plus gesture, dual light, and dual infrared sensors, with an optional AI vision module. Super early bird $179; MSRP $269.
Firmware is open on OpenCat, which Petoi calls GitHub’s most-starred quadruped project and says is cited in 20+ papers. Hardware is only partly open: Petoi will share printable shells and mounts, but load-bearing joints stay injection-molded.
What it actually does
Unlike a wheeled desk bot, Quaddle is meant to walk. The comparison table on the product page puts 4 servos against Bittle X’s 9 and Nybble Q’s 11. You lose some animal-like flourish; you get sideways glides, in-place spins, and a build Petoi says takes minutes instead of an hour.
Buddy and Scout add tap-to-record tricks with no app required. Scout is the sensing model: light, objects, gestures, then a decision about how to move. Every model has a built-in gyroscope; Scout adds a PIR sensor on the base kit and those extra heads.
Petoi is not a first-time crowdfund. Bittle’s October 2020 Kickstarter raised $567,000 from 2,052 backers, more than 11× its goal. Nybble’s 2018 Indiegogo raised $136,536 from 580 backers, per the About page.
A Human’s Take
Four servos and a $99 early-bird tag is the right shape for a desk quadruped: cheap enough to drop, open enough to reflash, and mechanically weird in a useful way. I want to see whether the omnidirectional gait holds up once hundreds of kits leave the Petoi shop, not just the launch film. If OpenCat policies transfer as easily as the marketing copy, this is a Bittle for people who do not want nine servos on the first night.