Zig — Animatronic Robot

I'm developing Zig, a two-leg, two-wheel self-balancing animatronic robot, inspired by Disney's BD-X.

Why wheels, not legs

Unlike a fully-legged BD-X, Zig rides on a two-wheel balancing base. That's a deliberate choice: wheels need far fewer motors than articulated legs, which makes the robot cheaper, lighter, and much simpler to control. A real walking legged robot is a whole project on its own — my focus here is the "animal" side. I want Zig to actually feel alive, not just to move.

A small, homemade build

It's a fully homemade design. I wanted something small and compact: lower cost, easier to transport, and more practical overall. Keeping it small was a real constraint, since this version has no custom PCB yet, so managing space was a big part of the challenge. Zig is around 23 cm tall and weighs 1.172 kg.

The physical breakdown of every part — neck, antennas, legs and wheels, torso — lives on the Robot page.

Architecture, in short

The architecture is one orchestrator — a Raspberry Pi 5 — with a slave microcontroller per subsystem: torso, legs & balance, and head. I control it through a Python interface running on a Legion Go, over WiFi — see the Remote Controller section. Full details live on the System Architecture and Robot Architecture pages.

Where the project stands

Right now I'm building the backbone — getting each part working reliably before I start layering in the "life": expressive behavior, lighting eyes, and more. Over the next few weeks I'll publish full documentation and keep updating it regularly. It's not open source for now — that needs more time to do properly — but the docs will explain my design choices and the overall system as they're written.

Gallery

Pictures of the robot are coming soon: full views from the front, side, bottom, and top, plus detail shots of the head, antennas, neck, legs, torso, and wheels.

Going further

System Architecture · Robot · Remote Controller · Offboard Compute & Remote Station · Flight Case & Logistics