Zowi

Zowi is a small, open-source, 3D-printable biped robot I created back in 2015 while working at BQ’s innovation lab. It was fully designed in FreeCAD, using components from previous projects and sized to fit a BQ Zum board and standard-size servos.

Before that, I had been working on more complex robots like my humanoid Raider, so I wanted to make something much more accessible, something the BQ innovation team could use as a playground for ideas. Juan Gonzalez, better known as Obijuan, immediately saw the potential of this little robot. With his extensive background in snake-like robots, he was the first to implement oscillator-based walking gaits for Zowi, and that’s really what brought it to life.

At the time, there were already several biped robots out there with 2 to 4 degrees of freedom. One of the best-known in this category is BoB the biped, a 3D-printable biped created by Kevin Biagini and released under a CC-BY-SA license. BoB was a huge inspiration for Zowi. In fact, the original idea was to call this robot ZoB (“Zum on BoB”). Obijuan later suggested Zobi as a catchier name, and eventually, BQ’s marketing department settled on Zowi.

Unfortunately, folks at BQ (outside of our team) didn’t really grasp what it means to build on open-source projects, and they didn’t handle the situation properly. As a result, Kevin was understandably a bit upset. It’s a shame I never had the chance to contact with him directly, I’m pretty sure things would’ve gone a lot smoother. From what I’ve heard, Kevin is now active in robot combat competitions. It’d be awesome to cross paths at an event someday. Massive respect to him and his work!

If you you want to give it a try, you can find all the files and instructions to build your own Zowi on Zowi’s GitHub repo.

Just like with Minikame, since Zowi’s release there have been tons of remakes out in the wild (some respecting the license better than others). One of the most notable is Otto DIY, a robot that came out after BQ’s Zowi and was heavily inspired by its design, but built using more accessible components. If you’re looking to build a bot using micro servos with solid documentation, Otto DIY is a great option.