Following in the footsteps of the GPT-enhanced Figure 01 humanoid that amazed us last month, Chinese company UBTech has teamed up with Baidu to give its new Walker S industrial humanoid the power of natural speech and real-time reasoning. real.
Shenzhen-based UBTech was founded in 2012 and introduced its first humanoid a few years later, although it was a pint-sized toy robot. A few hundred of these Alpha Bots gathered for a dance in 2016, but it was a Dobi variation that entered the world. Guinness world record books in 2017 with a gathering of more than a thousand bipeds performing movements in unison.
Last year, the company expanded its education efforts with crowdfunding for a robot building kit which allowed young scientists to create seven robots. But the topic of today's multitasking video is a variation of the company's life-size video. Walker Service Bot which was demonstrated at CES 2018.
The new Walker S was one of two humanoids on stage with executives in Hong Kong late last year, for hit the gong and mark the listing of the company on the stock exchange. He now seeks to challenge players like Figure 01, Day before And Phoenix showing off their speaking, folding and placing skills.
UBTECH x Baidu: one step closer to real-world embedded smart applications
These natural conversations are due to the integration of search giant Baidu. ERNIE Bot Multimodal AI Platform launched last year. The response time between the human voice prompt and the Walker S's response seems about the same as we saw in Figure's GPT-enhanced demo in mid-March, maybe even a little snappier .
ERNIE Bot and variable learning models are used to determine what task is required and how to complete it. The folding technique here is somewhat sloppy compared to that of a human salesman at a mall, but probably comparable to my own hurried attempts to put laundry away as quickly as possible – and it looks like the robot can even give some fashion advice.
Meanwhile, the pick-and-place demo shows real-time task flexibility, with the sneaky human removing objects from the board and putting them back in front, only for the Walker S to move them to the correct end point without complain. Performing such tasks may be slower than human workers at the moment, but the benefit of having tireless, compliant and precise robot operators on the production line appears to be an advantage. a no-brainer for manufacturers.
UBTech launched the Walker S last year to serve industrial applications and quickly entered into partnerships with several automakers – including NIO – “strategically plan the progressive implementation of humanoid robots in manufacturing scenarios”.
The new bot doesn't have its own presence on the company's website at the moment, so we're not able to go into detail, but you'll notice that it has a Optimus meets Figure 01 sort of look at it. It sports circular swirling visuals for the face rather than the cutesy animations found on the company's original Walker robot. Onboard depth sensors and vision cameras help it process and navigate the world around it, as well as recognize 3D objects to avoid obstacles. And it even seems to have human-like hands for manipulating objects.
UBTech's collaboration with Baidu is of course just the beginning of its AI improvement journey, and it will be interesting to see how ERNIE Bot compares to GPT running on the humanoid in Figure 01, and what progress will result from NVIDIA. entry into space. Given the incredibly rapid pace of recent developments in this area, we believe that astonishing advancements in technology and capabilities are not far away.
Source: UBTech