ReportWire

Tag: humanoid robot

  • As Elon Musk plans a robot army, China’s humanoid bots are already on the market

    [ad_1]

    As Elon Musk touted plans to eventually manufacture an army of Tesla bots in Silicon Valley this month, humanoid robots were already being produced and sold to consumers in China.

    Chinese and U.S. companies have begun a battle to build the world’s best bots. While it’s early days, experts say China is leading in the quantity of robots delivered to consumers, while America is ahead in the quality of robots demonstrated.

    Musk danced with Tesla’s Optimus bots at his company’s shareholder meeting and outlined plans for a factory in Fremont that he said will someday have the capacity to build a million bots a year, which would sell for around $20,000 in today’s dollars. One of China’s leading robotics companies, Unitree Robotics, already has a humanoid robot on the market that can walk, dance and perform basic tasks. Its least expensive version costs around $6,000.

    Tesla robot Optimus serves popcorn to guests at the Tesla Diner on the restaurant’s opening day on July 21.

    (Stephanie Breijo / Los Angeles Times)

    While the inexpensive Unitree bot is far less sophisticated than Optimus, its early entrance into the real-world market at an affordable price demonstrates China’s edge. The country has the parts, the production facilities and the pool of labor required to bring the rapidly evolving robots to market quickly and cheaply, said P.K. Tseng, an analyst at the tech consulting firm TrendForce.

    “The U.S. leads in technological innovation, while China excels in speed of implementation,” he said. “The real turning point will arrive when humanoid robots move beyond R&D prototypes to large-scale deployment.”

    The International Federation of Robotics, IFR, estimates that there are at least 80 humanoid robot companies in China, five times that of the U.S. A Morgan Stanley report on humanoid robots earlier this year estimated that Chinese companies had more than twice the number of robots unveiled than U.S. companies since 2022, while Chinese organizations have applied for more than three times the number of patents using the word “humanoid” in the last five years.

    At the forefront is Unitree, which went viral in January after its humanoid robots performed a Chinese folk dance live, marching rhythmically while tossing and twirling handkerchiefs. That model, which costs about $90,000, won the opening race at the inaugural Beijing Humanoid Robot Games in August, taking 6½ minutes to run about one mile.

    Students interact with a humanoid robot in China.

    Students from the Primary School Affiliated to Hefei Normal School interact with the humanoid robot “Xiao An” after a science class on Oct. 27 in Hefei, Anhui province, in China.

    (China News Service via Getty Images)

    The company has become a Chinese tech darling and is preparing for an initial public offering with a reported valuation as high as $7 billion.

    The ultimate goal of a general-purpose robot, one that can package goods, do household chores and assist in surgical procedures, is still years away. Humanoid robots are not yet fully autonomous and are mostly purchased by hobbyists, research institutions or manufacturers. Hyundai Motor Group is deploying robots made by Boston Dynamics in its car factories. In China, humanoid robots are also bought and rented as entertainment, to dance and perform at events.

    According to TrendForce, the latest generation of Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot greatly surpasses the products of China’s top manufacturers, including Unitree, in body and hand versatility, load capacity and battery life. Another advantage U.S. robotics companies have is advanced artificial intelligence capabilities, which will be crucial in developing robots that can learn to carry out basic human tasks on their own.

    Musk says Tesla’s edge is that it has the engineering capability to build limbs, AI to run the brains, and the manufacturing know-how to mass-produce the bots. He projects that the movements of the next generation of Optimus will be indistinguishable from those of humans.

    “It will seem as though there’s someone like a person in a robot outfit,” he told shareholders this month. “Really, it’s going to be something special.”

    His prediction recently came true — in China. EV maker XPeng demonstrated its latest bot this month and its casual gait was so human-like that the company had to convince some skeptics it was a robot by bringing heavy scissors on stage to cut away its synthetic skin and reveal its mechanical insides.

    By prioritizing commercialization, Chinese manufacturers are leaning on government support and manufacturing prowess for an upper hand in the latest frontier of a tech rivalry with the U.S., similar to how it came to dominate other industries like solar panels and electric cars.

    “They’re not first mover in anything. But they’re building a lot of robots, selling them really, really cheap, and just trying to get them out in the world,” said Erik Walenza-Slabe, a managing partner of Asia Growth Partners, a Shanghai-based consultancy that helps businesses expand in Asia. “That might be a better strategy in the long term.”

    Morgan Stanley estimates that the humanoid robot market will be worth $5 trillion by 2050, at which point China would probably have nearly four times as many humanoid robots in use as the U.S. Even as U.S. robot makers like Tesla expand production, their efforts could be hampered by a reliance on components that need to be sourced from China, such as screws, motors and batteries, the bank’s analysts said.

    A robot rehearses the 100-meter race before the opening ceremony of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August.

    A robot rehearses the 100-meter race before the opening ceremony of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August.

    (Ng Han Guan / Associated Press)

    While China’s mass deployment may help its companies beat the U.S. to real-world training, public mishaps have highlighted the limitations of Chinese technology and the potential risks to human safety.

    During the first robot half marathon in Beijing this year, many mechanical competitors fell down and overheated and only six out of 21 completed the course. Last December, a Unitree bot fell over and started convulsing at a demonstration, drawing online mockery.

    Meanwhile, the trade war between China and the U.S. could impede the development of better bots by both sides.

    Both countries have sought to build and leverage their strengths in high-tech fields. The U.S. has restricted exports of semiconductors to China, in an effort to stymie its rival’s technological development. Meanwhile, China has a near monopoly on rare earth metals, a critical component in batteries and computer chips, and has stepped up export controls to squeeze the U.S. and other nations.

    To achieve self-sufficiency, China has made advanced robotics a key tenet of its national strategy for technological and economic development. Earlier this year, China announced a state-backed venture fund to raise and invest $138 billion in robotics and artificial intelligence.

    “What China has wanted to do ever since they entered the robotics game is to circumvent the dominance of traditional technology by foreign vendors,” said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst for AI and robotics in Asia at Omdia, a research firm. “The only reason why China can do that is because they have policy support.”

    The lack of similar government policies in the U.S. could hamper efforts to compete with China, said Susanne Bieller, general secretary of the IFR, particularly as deployment and data become central to training robots with artificial intelligence.

    “In China, the government is encouraging companies to test out the new technology and that’s a critical advantage. That’s something American startups investing in humanoids will have to work much harder for,” she said.

    [ad_2]

    Stephanie Yang

    Source link

  • 1X Neo is a $20,000 home robot that will learn chores via teleoperation

    [ad_1]

    California-based AI and robotics company 1X is now accepting pre-orders for its humanoid robot NEO, which was designed to automate everyday chores and to offer personalized assistance. Users will be able to control NEO and have it accomplish tasks around the house with the click of a button or a verbal command. It will come with the ability to do basic tasks autonomously when it starts shipping next year, including opening doors, fetching items and turning the lights on or off. However, if early adopters want NEO to be capable of more specific or complex tasks, they’d have to be comfortable with the idea of a human teleoperator controlling the robot remotely and seeing inside their homes.

    In an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern, 1X CEO Bernt Børnich explained that the AI neural network running the machine still needs to learn from more real-world experiences. Børnich said that anybody who buys NEO for delivery next year will have to agree that a human operator will be seeing inside their houses through the robot’s camera. It’s necessary to be able to teach the machines and gather training data so it can eventually perform tasks autonomously. “If we don’t have your data, we can’t make the product better,” he said.

    Børnich admitted that much of the work will be done by teleoperators in the beginning. Owners will have access to an app where they can schedule when the teleoperator can take over NEO and where they can specify the task they want the machine to do. He said 1X is putting control in the hands of the owner to respect people’s privacy as much as possible. The company can blur people so that the remote operator doesn’t see them, and owners can designate no-go zones in their homes that the operator cannot go to. Teleoperators also cannot take control of NEO without the owner’s approval.

    1X NEO is available in tan, gray and dark brown. It’s now available for pre-order from the company’s website with a deposit of $200. Those who want early access to it can get it for $20,000, but it will also be available as a subscription service of $499 a month.

    [ad_2]

    Mariella Moon

    Source link

  • Chinese startup shows off a dancing humanoid robot that starts at $1,400

    [ad_1]

    For roughly the same price as a flagship smartphone, you could instead buy an affordable humanoid robot that’s meant for consumer and educational use. Noetix Robotics, a Beijing-based startup, revealed its Bumi robot that’s priced at nearly 10,000 yuan, or around $1,400.

    Unlike higher-end robots, the inexpensive Bumi stands at around three feet tall and weighs about 26 lbs. You won’t find Noetix’s latest robot on assembly lines or in research labs, especially since early demos only show Bumi walking around and dancing. According to a TechNode report, Bumi will offer a programming interface that allows for learning or creative tasks. The report also noted that Noetix is planning to put the Bumi up for preorders later this year. Before the Bumi, Noetix Robotics showed off its expertise by competing in the world’s first half-marathon for robots with its N2 model, which was one of four robotic competitors that completed the race.

    At such a low price point, Bumi beats out another relatively affordable option that was announced earlier this year. In the summer, Unitree showed off its R1 robot that starts at $5,900 and could handle complex tasks. While the Bumi sets a new price tag to beat, both Noetix and Unitree are offering more affordable options than Tesla’s Optimus bot, which had an early price estimate of around $20,000.

    [ad_2]

    Jackson Chen

    Source link

  • Watch This New Robot Relax in the Creepiest Way Possible

    Watch This New Robot Relax in the Creepiest Way Possible

    [ad_1]

    The past decade has seen humanoid robot makers trying to make their creations more and more like humans. But here in 2024, we seem to be witnessing an odd shift in the dexterity of our bipedal robo-dreams. Put bluntly, robotics companies aren’t afraid of getting weird with the contortions of their latest offerings.

    Warning! Microsoft Wants ChatGPT to Control Robots Next

    China-based Unitree Robotics released a new video on Monday, available on YouTube, showing off the new G1 which retails for $16,000. It’s just the latest demonstration of a robot maneuvering in entirely un-human ways to accomplish its goals, as you can see in the GIF above.

    The video includes lots of odd movements, showing how the robot can get up off the ground or greet people by pulling a sort of Exorcist move with its torso, rotating 180 degrees. And it all looks strikingly similar to the new version of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, which has a novel way of getting on its feet.

    There’s also a demonstration of the Unitree robot getting kicked and pushed, presumably to show how well it can balance, even when it meets resistance. But we’d be lying if we said it didn’t make us uncomfortable. These are, after all, robots made to look like humans. And watching wanton cruelty, even against a machine that doesn’t have feelings, sets off something deep in our brain that says they shouldn’t be doing that.

    Unitree Introducing | Unitree G1 Humanoid Agent | AI Avatar | Price from $16K

    Again, these contortions all seem a bit new. A decade ago, Gizmodo attended the DARPA Robotics Challenge in Southern California, where teams largely competed by trying to make their robots as much like humans as possible. Companies like Boston Dynamics released new videos each year showing its robots walking, running, and then eventually doing backflips, all in the same way that talented humans might do it.

    But we seem to be on the cusp of a new era when it comes to robotics. Most robot makers have achieved basic human-style walking and running. The new frontier is taking that form factor and turning them into super-humans, whether by performing gymnastics or applying logic and reason to the world in front of them.

    We’re still a long way from AGI that’ll help robots get chores done, but if we continue on this trajectory, it seems unlikely robots will be doing the mundane tasks that humans don’t want to do. We allowed AI to skip all the boring stuff and jump right ahead to making music and writing poetry. It seems silly to think we’re building an army of butlers to serve humanity with that technology. No, we’re probably going to be letting the robots paint beautiful landscapes while we’re all stuck at our desks filling out Excel spreadsheets if the recent past is any guide.

    [ad_2]

    Matt Novak

    Source link

  • Humanoid robots are learning to fall well | TechCrunch

    Humanoid robots are learning to fall well | TechCrunch

    [ad_1]

    The savvy marketers at Boston Dynamics produced two major robotics news cycles last week. The larger of the two was, naturally, the electric Atlas announcement. As I write this, the sub-40 second video is steadily approaching five million views. A day prior, the company tugged at the community’s heart strings when it announced that the original hydraulic Atlas was being put out to pasture, a decade after its introduction.

    The accompanying video was a celebration of the older Atlas’ journey from DARPA research project to an impressively nimble bipedal ’bot. A minute in, however, the tone shifts. Ultimately, “Farewell to Atlas” is as much a celebration as it is a blooper reel. It’s a welcome reminder that for every time the robot sticks the landing on video there are dozens of slips, falls and sputters.

    Image Credits: Boston Dynamics

    I’ve long championed this sort of transparency. It’s the sort of thing I would like to see more from the robotics world. Simply showcasing the highlight reel does a disservice to the effort that went into getting those shots. In many cases, we’re talking years of trial and error spent getting robots to look good on camera. When you only share the positive outcomes, you’re setting unrealistic expectations. Bipedal robots fall over. In that respect, at least, they’re just like us. As Agility put it recently, “Everyone falls sometimes, it’s how we get back up that defines us.” I would take that a step further, adding that learning how to fall well is equally important.

    The company’s newly appointed CTO, Pras Velagapudi, recently told me that seeing robots fall on the job at this stage is actually a good thing. “When a robot is actually out in the world doing real things, unexpected things are going to happen,” he notes. “You’re going to see some falls, but that’s part of learning to run a really long time in real-world environments. It’s expected, and it’s a sign that you’re not staging things.”

    A quick scan of Harvard’s rules for falling without injury reflects what we intuitively understand about falling as humans:

    1. Protect your head
    2. Use your weight to direct your fall
    3. Bend your knees
    4. Avoid taking other people with you

    As for robots, this IEEE Spectrum piece from last year is a great place to start.

    “We’re not afraid of a fall—we’re not treating the robots like they’re going to break all the time,” Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders told the publication last year. “Our robot falls a lot, and one of the things we decided a long time ago [is] that we needed to build robots that can fall without breaking. If you can go through that cycle of pushing your robot to failure, studying the failure, and fixing it, you can make progress to where it’s not falling. But if you build a machine or a control system or a culture around never falling, then you’ll never learn what you need to learn to make your robot not fall. We celebrate falls, even the falls that break the robot.”

    Image Credits: Boston Dynamics

    The subject of falling also came up when I spoke with Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter ahead of the electric Atlas’ launch. Notably, the short video begins with the robot in a prone position. The way the robot’s legs arc around is quite novel, allowing the system to stand up from a completely flat position. At first glance, it almost feels as though the company is showing off, using the flashy move simply as a method to showcase the extremely robust custom-built actuators.

    “There will be very practical uses for that,” Playter told me. “Robots are going to fall. You’d better be able to get up from prone.” He adds that the ability to get up from a prone position may also be useful for charging purposes.

    Much of Boston Dynamics’ learnings around falling came from Spot. While there’s generally more stability in the quadrupedal form factor (as evidenced from decades trying and failing to kick the robots over in videos), there are simply way more hours of Spot robots working in real-world conditions.

    Image Credits: Agility Robotics

    “Spot’s walking something like 70,000 kms a year on factory floors, doing about 100,000 inspections per month,” adds Playter. “They do fall, eventually. You have to be able to get back up. Hopefully you get your fall rate down — we have. I think we’re falling once every 100-200 kms. The fall rate has really gotten small, but it does happen.”

    Playter adds that the company has a long history of being “rough” on its robots. “They fall, and they’ve got to be able to survive. Fingers can’t fall off.”

    Watching the above Atlas outtakes, it’s hard not to project a bit of human empathy onto the ’bot. It really does appear to fall like a human, drawing its extremities as close to its body as possible, to protect them from further injury.

    When Agility added arms to Digit, back in 2019, it discussed the role they play in falling. “For us, arms are simultaneously a tool for moving through the world — think getting up after a fall, waving your arms for balance, or pushing open a door — while also being useful for manipulating or carrying objects,” co-founder Jonathan Hurst noted at the time.

    I spoke a bit to Agility about the topic at Modex earlier this year. Video of a Digit robot falling over on a convention floor a year prior had made the social media rounds. “With a 99% success rate over about 20 hours of live demos, Digit still took a couple of falls at ProMat,” Agility noted at the time. “We have no proof, but we think our sales team orchestrated it so they could talk about Digits quick-change limbs and durability.”

    As with the Atlas video, the company told me that something akin to a fetal position is useful in terms of protecting the robot’s legs and arms.

    The company has been using reinforcement learning to help fallen robots right themselves. Agility shut off Digit’s obstacle avoidance for the above video to force a fall. In the video, the robot uses its arms to mitigate the fall as much as possible. It then utilizes its reinforcement learnings to return to a familiar position from which it is capable of standing again with a robotic pushup.

    One of humanoid robots’ main selling points is their ability to slot into existing workflows — these factories and warehouses are known as “brownfield,” meaning they weren’t custom built for automation. In many existing cases of factory automation, errors mean the system effectively shuts down until a human intervenes.

    “Rescuing a humanoid robot is not going to be trivial,” says Playter, noting that these systems are heavy and can be difficult to manually right. “How are you going to do that if it can’t get itself off the ground?”

    If these systems are truly going to ensure uninterrupted automation, they’ll need to fall well and get right back up again.

    “Every time Digit falls, we learn something new,” adds Velagapudi. “When it comes to bipedal robotics, falling is a wonderful teacher.”

    [ad_2]

    Brian Heater

    Source link

  • Inversion Space will test its space-based delivery tech in October | TechCrunch

    Inversion Space will test its space-based delivery tech in October | TechCrunch

    [ad_1]

    Inversion Space is aptly named. The three-year-old startup’s primary concern is not getting things to space, but bringing them back — transforming the ultimate high ground into “a transportation layer for Earth.”

    The company’s plan — ultra-fast, on-demand deliveries to anywhere on Earth — sounds like pie in the sky, but it’s the sort of moonshot goal that could transform terrestrial cargo transportation. The aim is to send up fleets of earth-orbiting vehicles that will be able to shoot back to Earth at Mach speeds, slow with specially-made parachutes, and deliver cargo in minutes.

    Inversion has developed a pathfinder vehicle, called Ray, that’s a technical precursor to a larger platform that will debut in 2026. Ray will head to space this October, on SpaceX’s Transporter-12 ride share mission, paving the way for Inversion’s future plans on orbit (and back).

    Ray is small — about twice the diameter of a standard frisbee — and will spend anywhere from one and five weeks in space, depending on factors like weather and how the orbit aligns with the landing site, Inversion CEO Justin Fiaschetti explained in a recent interview.

    This first mission will have three phases: the initial on-orbit phase, where the spacecraft will power on, charge its batteries, and hopefully send telemetry to the ground. During the second phase, Ray will use its onboard propulsion system to slow down the vehicle so it starts losing altitude and reentering the atmosphere. The reentry capsule will separate from the satellite bus (both designed in-house), with the latter structure burning up.

    The third and final phase will see Ray slow down using a supersonic drogue parachute, from a reentry speed of Mach 1.8 to Mach 0.2. The main parachute will then deploy, further slowing the capsule to a soft splashdown off the coast of California.

    Impressively, the company has designed and built almost all of the Ray vehicle in-house, from the propulsion system to the structure to the parachutes. This last component is key: almost no space company designs parachutes themselves, and they’re incredibly challenging to engineer from the ground up. Inversion’s engineering team completed qualification testing of the deployment and parachute systems last year.

    Fiaschetti said strong vertical integration has helped the company move so quickly.

    “The purpose of our Ray vehicle is to develop technology for our next-gen vehicle. As such, we’ve built basically the entire vehicle in-house,” Fiaschetti said. “What we saw was that if we can build in-house now, do the hard thing first, that allows us to scale very quickly and meet our customer needs.”

    The reentry vehicle is totally passive — meaning it doesn’t have active controls to navigate its reentry to Earth — but the company’s larger next-gen vehicle, called Arc, will have “football field-level” accuracy.

    Inversion was founded by CEO Justin Fiaschetti and CTO Austin Briggs in 2021, but the two go back further: they met for the first time when they sat next to each other at a Boston University freshman matriculation ceremony. The pair eventually got jobs in southern California — Briggs, as a propulsion development engineer at ABL Space Systems, while Fiaschetti had brief engineering stints at Relativity and SpaceX — and they were actually roommates when they first floated the idea of developing technology to deliver cargo anywhere on Earth.

    The company went through Y Combinator in the summer of 2021 (it was one of our favorites from the cohort) and closed its $10 million seed round in November that same year.

    “We’ve been off to the races ever since,” Fiaschetti said. The company’s grown to 25 employees, who are based out of Torrance, California, where they have a 5,000-square-foot facility. The startup also owns five acres of land in the Mojave Desert, where it conducts engine testing. The scaling of the team and this first mission have been entirely financed by that round.

    The startup sees promising markets in both government agencies and private companies; both segments could use Inversion’s reusable platform as an on-orbit testbed, or as a delivery vehicle to a private commercial space station. Inversion is aiming on pushing both reusability and duration-on-orbit “to the maximum” to bring down costs and also to support different mission profiles, Fiaschetti said.

    Inversion aims to fly the next-gen vehicle, Arc, for the first time in 2026. While the two cofounders declined to provide more details on the spacecraft, the company’s website says it will be capable of carrying over 150 kilograms of cargo, to provide “proliferated” delivery in space.

    “We are testing hardware consistently. We’re developing an infrastructure to be able to scale ourselves. Just as our decision to bring parachutes in house was a decision because the parachutes are so directly applicable to what we’re building, it’s making those kinds of key decisions that allows us to move move much faster than another reentry vehicle would take much longer to develop.”

    [ad_2]

    Aria Alamalhodaei

    Source link

  • The loneliness of the robotic humanoid | TechCrunch

    The loneliness of the robotic humanoid | TechCrunch

    [ad_1]

    Perhaps a few years from now, the halls of the Georgia World Congress Center will be peppered with humanoid robots the week of Modex. In 2024, however, Digit stands alone at the supply chain show. It’s a testament to Agility’s healthy head start over competitors like Figure, Tesla, 1X and Apptronik. This time last year at Modex (the Chicago version of the conference), Digit had something of an industrial automation coming out party. A line of the bipedal robots were moving totes to a nearby conveyor belt at select times throughout the week.

    This week in Atlanta, a rotating cast of eight Digits are working each day from show opening to close. This time, however, the blue and silver robots are doing something a bit different. The demos showcase lineside replenishment and tote retrieval with a flow rack designed for automotive manufacturing. Agility tells TechCrunch that it is currently working with automotive customers — though it has yet to release any names.

    Famously, Ford was among Agility’s first proponents, announcing a partnership way back at CES 2020. Ultimately, plans to put Digit to work making last-mile deliveries fizzled, as the company instead pivoted focus to the nearer-term issue of warehouse staffing. That proved to be a canny move, as labor figures still have yet to return post-COVID. Former Agility CEO Damion Shelton told me last week that last-mile is still on the table, but there’s more than enough to focus on in the warehouse and manufacturing sectors to keep the company occupied.

    Putting together a C-suite has been an important piece of the company’s growth over the past 12 months. Co-founders Shelton and Jonathan Hurst have shifted roles, from CEO and CTO to president and chief robotics officer, respectively. A week ago today, former Magic Leap CEO Peggy Johnson took the chief executive role over from Shelton. Last year, the company named Fetch founder and CEO Melonee Wise to the CTO role and brought former Apple and Ford executive Aindrea Campbell in as COO.

    The leadership changes point to a company taking commercialization more seriously. They also put Agility in rare air among top robotics companies, with women in five of its nine C-suite roles.

    Agility is ramping up production volumes, with plans to hit “high double-digit” production of its bipedal robot by end of year. This week at Modex, the company took the wraps off Agility Arc, deployment and fleet management software for Digit.

    “The automation platform has all of the things you would expect from a fleet management system, in terms of battery, charging management, workflow management and robot tasking,” Wise tells TechCrunch. “But it also has the other aspects that you need for deploying and configuring a system and remotely monitoring and supporting the system. It’s a single pane of glass that allows you to basically do everything related to managing a fleet of Digits.”

    Johnson, who previously helmed Magic Leap’s shaky pivot into enterprise, says the new enterprise software gave her confidence that her new company has surer footing than her last.

    “The thing that was really encouraging when I learned about the new cloud automation system is that it’s such a sign of the maturation of the company,” she says. “This is not just a device, it’s something that’s meant to integrate. So often at [Johnson’s former employer] Microsoft, that would be the trip-up point. You would have some isolated system over here that wasn’t integrated with everything else and didn’t provide the value that it could. So, the fact that it will be able to integrate with WMS systems and other things the company is already using is a big weight off them.”

    Image Credits: Brian Heater

    For Johnson, Modex has been a massive learning experience. She spoke to us last week from Japan, where she had recently competed in the Tokyo marathon. She hopped on a plane back to the States over the weekend specifically to get a first-hand view of the supply chain/logistics world of which she is now a part. “I wanted to make sure I was here to see not only the customers, but the environment the devices work in. I’m going to spend a lot of time walking around today and immerse myself in that.”

    Johnson’s primary pitch as CEO is a quick path to ROI. That’s achievable in no small part to the fact that Digit is available through a RaaS (robotics-as-a-service) model, which has become an increasingly popular way to convince companies to take the leap. Customers can now pilot these systems without having to worry about massive upfront costs.

    It’s those customers who ultimately shape Digit’s future. The model on the floor demonstrating an automotive workflow has a new pair of end effectors. Rather than the flipper-style appendages the company has been showcasing, this Digit has four digits of its own on each hand, with two pairs of hooked fingers facing in opposite directions. This isn’t dexterous mobile manipulation, however. Instead, it’s designed to do the thing that Digit has been doing all along: transporting totes.

    The totes here are quite wide however (as is custom on the automotive line), prohibiting the robot from embracing it with an arm on each side. Instead the effectors grasp the front of the totes. This method also affords a more stable grip on a box that often has heavy, untethered objects rolling around inside.

    In the not too distant future, Wise envisions a version of Digit that can swap out its end effectors as needed.

    “When you look at the end effector specifically, there’s about 60 years of prior art,” she says. “All of [Modex], if you look around, all of these robot arms have different end effectors. That’s a very well understood thing. There’s something called ‘end of arm tooling.’ It’s swappable. What we’re going to be driving toward as a product is having swappable end of arm tooling and eventually make that an automated process.”

    With what could be perceived as a dig at some of the humanoid robot competition, Shelton notes, “but interestingly, 0% of the solutions are five-fingered, 27-degrees of freedom hands.” He adds, “there have been some of our competitors who have been on the record saying that they are using a five-fingered hand basically as a branding exercise.”

    As far as what the competition should be focused on, Wise believes Agility’s peers should center on safety — a huge concern when introducing new technologies into a warehouse setting. “We need to, collectively as an industry, get our safety story straight,” she says. “We as an industry need to come together and decide what the safety norms are.”

    Johnson adds that companies need to focus on the task at hand. “Stay focused on the here and now and what can be done,” she says. “Everyone needs a roadmap, but stay focused and prove it out.”

    [ad_2]

    Brian Heater

    Source link

  • Elon Musk’s Latest Robot Video Looks Like It Was Shot on a Phone From 2002

    Elon Musk’s Latest Robot Video Looks Like It Was Shot on a Phone From 2002

    [ad_1]

    Elon Musk has shared a new video on Saturday featuring Optimus, the robot Tesla has been working on since 2021. But anyone who tries to watch the video will immediately notice something weird. The clip of Optimus is so low quality and pixelated that it looks like it was shot on a flip-phone from two decades ago.

    Mr. Tweet Fumbles Super Bowl Tweet

    The new video was posted in the early morning hours of Saturday and has been viewed over 35 million times as of this writing. But the video appears to show Optimus just walking around without doing much of anything. That would have been quite impressive around 2013 or so, since it’s relatively difficult to get machines to walk like humans, but it’s not entirely clear why Musk would want the world to see Optimus walking like this.

    Update, 3:58 p.m. ET: At some point in the past 30 minutes or so Elon Musk’s video was swapped out to include a higher resolution version. Curiously, tweets that have been edited will typically show a note at the bottom that says a tweet has been edited and the time it occurred, but Musk’s tweet doesn’t indicate anything has been changed.

    The screenshots below show a side-by-side of what the tweet looked like before it was changed to include a higher resolution video.

    Screenshot: Elon Musk / X

    We’ve reached out to Twitter to see if Musk has special rules as owner of the social media platform and will update this post if we hear back. The rest of this post is being kept up for posterity.

    Incremental technical achievements aside, why does this video look so terrible? We weren’t the only ones to notice the bizarrely pixelated quality, as plenty of Musk fans made jokes about the blurriness.

    “Was this filmed with a potato?” one user quipped.

    “Same photographer?” another X user quipped with a photo of Bigfoot.

    Tesla didn’t immediately respond to questions about this new video of Optimus emailed Saturday.

    Musk unveiled Optimus with an unconventional presentation in the summer of 2021 that really felt like the billionaire was desperate to hype virtually anything futuristic. Tesla’s AI Day that year didn’t feature a real robot, but rather someone dressed in a white and black suit moving around like a stereotypical robot before starting to dance a jig.

    Tesla’s robot has made progress since that first jokey unveiling, but Optimus still has quite a ways to go before it can catch up to the most cutting edge robots of the 2020s. Atlas, a humanoid robot made by Boston Dynamics, started learning how to pick itself up in 2016, standing on one leg that same year, doing backflips in 2017, and achieved parkour-style jumping in 2018.

    And Atlas is still making progress in ways that rival how humans actually move. Last year, the Atlas robot showed off its ability to manipulate its environment to navigate complex worksites.

    Optimus has made improvements since it was first announced but it has quite a ways to go if it wants to catch up to a company like Boston Dynamics. Arguably the most impressive thing we’ve seen Optimus do is fold laundry, but if you take a close look at the video, there was a person standing just off-screen mimicking the movements. And, frankly, that’s technology that’s been possible since the 1960s.

    Can Tesla develop a truly autonomous robot that can work as a household servant, just as Musk has promised? Only time will tell. But we’ve been waiting on that version of the future for over a century now. Robotics is hard. But we can certainly keep dreaming.

    [ad_2]

    Matt Novak

    Source link

  • Humanoid robots face a major test with Amazon’s Digit pilots | TechCrunch

    Humanoid robots face a major test with Amazon’s Digit pilots | TechCrunch

    [ad_1]

    Announced amid a deluge of news at this week’s Delivering the Future event in Seattle was word that Amazon will begin testing Agility’s Digit in a move that could bring the bipedal robot to its nationwide fulfillment centers. It’s baby steps as these things go, and such early-stage deals don’t necessary mean something bigger down the road.

    Take, for instance Agility’s Ford pilot, when the startup was exploring last-mile delivery as a potential way forward. Not too long after, the firm began focusing Digit’s output exclusively on warehouse and factory work.

    In April of last year, Amazon named Agility one of the first five recipients of the company’s $1 billion Industrial Innovation Fund. While being included in the fund doesn’t guarantee that Amazon will utilize your technology down the road, it’s a pretty clear indicator that the retail giant is — at the very least — interested in its potential.

    “The Innovation Fund is really about exploring what’s possible out there,” Amazon Robotics chief technologist Tye Brady told me in an interview this week. “It’s about understanding practical real-world examples, as well.”

    The executive adds that, while Amazon Robotics has thus far exclusively traded in wheeled locomotion, legs present a good deal of possibility.

    “We are interested in walking robots,” says Brady. “I find that very interesting, the ability to move on different terrains is interesting. We’re also interested in what works — and frankly what doesn’t work — about it. The humanoid form is really interesting. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. We’re experimentalists at heart. We’re gonna figure that out. We’re going to do a pilot and see how that works out.”

    The company’s focus on wheeled AMRs (autonomous mobile robots) dates back to its 2012 purchase of Kiva Systems, whose platforms have formed the foundation for the whole of Amazon Robotics. There are currently 750,000 AMRs deployed across the company’s warehouse network. The company has launched non-AMR systems, as well, including picking arms like Sparrow, which was launched during the same event last year.

    It’s difficult to overstate how profound an impact Amazon’s efforts have had on the rest of the industrial robotics space. For one thing, the company has turned up the pressure for the competition to automate in order to meet growing customer expectations of same- and next-day deliveries. For another, the decision to stop supporting Kiva customers outside the Amazon ecosystem led directly to the foundation of some of the industry’s biggest names, including Locus Robotics and 6 River Systems.

    A system needs to demonstrate an increase in productivity in order for Amazon to integrate it into its growing robotics ecosystem. It’s less innovation for innovation’s sake, and more scoping out any possible advantage that will get goods to customers in less time. Including drones.

    How, precisely, humanoid robots specifically and bipedal robots more generally might slot in remains to be seen. The other big hurdle there is that any new system needs to match the company’s almost unthinkable scale.

    There are a number of startups vying to own the humanoid robotics crown at the moment, including 1X, Figure and Tesla. Agility’s Digit is the least human-looking of the bunch, but it’s got a ton of funding and a massive head start. The company also recently opened a new factory in Salem, Oregon, which it claims can produce up to 100,000 Digits a year once fully online.

    There’s no shortage of excitement around the category, but proving things out at scale is another question entirely. Whether Digit succeeds or fails at the tasks laid out for it could have a profound impact on the trajectory of humanoid robots generally. Much like the Kiva Systems have proven a major catalyst for AMRs, if Amazon successfully rolls out Digit at scale, suddenly everyone will want to get their hands on some humanoid workers.

    The biggest talking point around the form factor is the fact that humans build workspaces for other humans. That includes shelving heights, terrain, aisle width and the staircase, the bane of the ARM’s existence. From this standpoint a humanoid robot suddenly makes a lot more sense. The reality of things is that most companies operate in brownfield sites. That is to say their warehouses and factories generally aren’t built with specific automation solutions in mind. Humanoid robots slot nicely into a brownfield site.

    Of course, Amazon has the resources to build any facility it wants, so it’s logical that many of its own robots are effectively working in greenfield sites. Those limitations are less of a concern for Amazon than much of the competition, but obviously if an effective system can slot into the existing workflow with minimal friction, that’s certainly ideal.

    Image Credits: Amazon

    Brady confirms, however, that Digit isn’t the end-all, be-all of Amazon’s plans for mobile manipulation.

    “When you start to bring [sensing, compute and actuation] together in interesting combinations, really unique things start to happen,” he says. “We’re world leaders when it comes to mobile robots. And now we are very much in the business of manipulating not only packages, but also objects. And to bring them together, it’s exciting to see all of the possibilities.”

    That could mean alternate ways in. For instance, Amazon knows how to build both an AMR and a robot arm. If one were to effectively mount the latter to the former, they would have a kind of mobile manipulation on their hands.

    “You see with the Agility robot — you can think of that as a mobile manipulator,” says Brady. “That has interest to us. The mode of mobility has particular interest to us, because we don’t happen to have done a lot of work in bipedal robots. But absolutely, we could combine that with identification systems, manipulation systems, sortation systems. Anything and everything we’ll do to innovate for our customer and improve safety for employees. We’re getting there with the core fundamentals.”

    If for any reason Digit fails to stick the landing, that certainly doesn’t mean the end of it or bipedal robots generally. Perhaps it simply doesn’t sit comfortably in Amazon’s existing work flows. Maybe the robot’s not quite ready for Amazon scale or Amazon’s not quite in a place where Digit makes sense.

    Regardless, it would be smart for anyone remotely interested in bipedal robots to sit up and take notice here. The pilots could well have a profound impact on the way we think of the category, going forward.

    [ad_2]

    Brian Heater

    Source link