With the gradual maturity of artificial intelligence technology and the rapid development of the robot industry, more and more humanoid robots have gradually entered the public eye. In the face of the "heat" of humanoid robots, the industry said that there should be cold thinking, and the "one high and five difficult" of the humanoid robot industry needs to have a clear understanding, and the development of humanoid robots needs to be driven by application research.
Humanoid robots are hot
At the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference held in Shanghai not long ago, humanoid robots were one of the key display directions. At the entrance of the venue, the humanoid robot "phalanx" from 15 domestic enterprises and units was very prominent, attracting a large number of spectators. According to incomplete statistics, there were a total of about 45 intelligent robots on display at the conference, including 25 humanoid robots.
According to the International Federation of Robotics, the global humanoid robot market is growing at a rate of more than 20% per year; It is expected to reach tens of billions of dollars by 2025.
Xu Xiaolan, chairman of the Chinese Society of Electronics, said that the current focus of humanoid robots is not in the "humanoid", but more reflected in the integrated application of chips, sensors, software, artificial intelligence, communications, machinery, materials and many other cutting-edge technologies. "To have a smart brain, an agile cerebellum and a flexible body, humanoid robots are becoming a new highland in scientific and technological competition and a new track for future industries, with huge market space and development opportunities."
In recent years, Shanghai has given full play to the advantages of a strong robot industry base, a complete industrial chain, and a rich industrial ecology, and has taken humanoid robots as a new industrial track for key development, with urban coordination and strengthening, and the platform carrier service level has been comprehensively improved. The reporter learned that the country's first national and local humanoid robot innovation center was unveiled in Shanghai Pudong in May this year, and its self-developed humanoid robot "Green Dragon" was unveiled at the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference. With a height of 185cm and a weight of 80kg, the "green dragon" has 43 active degrees of freedom throughout its body, and even soft bread can be picked up to ensure that it does not deform.
Zhuang Mudi, deputy secretary-general of the Shanghai Municipal People's Government, said Shanghai will build an innovation ecology integrating technology research and development, achievement incubation, talent cultivation and platform support. Shanghai will join hands with Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui to initially form a humanoid robot core parts industry chain that radiates the Yangtze River Delta. At the same time, continue to promote the demonstration application landing, with major scene design as the traction, to promote the humanoid robot application landing.
Industrial applications face challenges
It is understood that the application of humanoid robot industry is accelerating.
At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2024, Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus II (Optimus) booth staff told reporters that Optimus has used visual neural networks and FSD chips to imitate human operations in the Tesla factory for battery sorting training.
As one of the Fifteen "Ocean's Fifteen" humanoid robots at the entrance of the 2024 World Human Intelligence Conference, Fourier General humanoid Robot GR-1 Bank Lobby Manager Scene Training Base has been officially opened in the Shanghai Pudong Branch of China Construction Bank recently.
Gu Jie, CEO of Fourier Intelligence, said the GR-1 can guide customers in bank lobbies, divert calls and give customers simple anti-fraud training. "The capabilities that are currently available are more geared towards verbal interaction with humans. We hope that the next step can be more integrated with the body, such as through some body language and walking ability, to be able to welcome guests, patrol, and even deposit and withdraw money, text binding and other tasks."
Why are the current humanoid robots more inclined to language interaction? Qi Guosheng, chairman of Guoshuang Technology, introduced that this is related to the acquisition of large model training data. "The large language model we see today is relatively easy to obtain high-quality training data on the Internet, but when it comes to industrial scenarios, the data generated by its business links is not easy to obtain, and the promotion process is quite complex." This is not something that can be advanced by a few companies and a few schools, but it needs to build a new era of innovation."
Wang He, an assistant professor at Peking University and director of the Bek-Galaxy Joint Laboratory of Embodied Intelligence, also called data "the biggest challenge outside of ontology" for the humanoid robot industry. He cited the implementation of the function of humanoid robots to sort batteries as an example, which seems simple, but the collection of data requires a lot of money and time. Therefore, whether the training data can be efficiently obtained will be related to the industry "whether the business model is benign and can operate."
Jiang Lei, chief scientist of the National and local humanoid Robot Innovation Center, also said that the topic of scene landing and industrial application of humanoid robots is very hot, but the industry still needs "cold thinking" because the development road of humanoid robots is too long and difficult. "We summarize the current problems facing humanoid robots as' one high and five difficulties', that is, high hardware threshold, difficult software algorithm, hard and soft decoupling, difficult knowledge accumulation, difficult talent gathering, and difficult security application."
Open source and open construction ecology
Industry insiders pointed out that to better promote the development of the humanoid robot industry, open source and ecological construction will be an important step.
At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2024, the "Green Dragon" released by the National and Local Robot Innovation Center is the world's first full-size universal humanoid robot open source public version machine.
"Compared to two years ago, the humanoid robot industry is booming now. A common idea we have at this time is how to build the base technology of our national humanoid robot. Our approach is open source, and our team hopes to release a new version every year, so that everyone can get our design reference and carry out a lot of robot innovation." Mr. Jiang said.
Taking the "lack of high-quality training data" commonly mentioned in the current industry as an example, the national and local co-construction of humanoid robot innovation Center will provide standardized data acquisition tools, as well as rapid data secondary evaluation based on the digital twin system. In addition, the center will also build open and open-source annotation tools, encourage ecological alliance units to accelerate data set construction together, and empower applications through open source data scenarios and industry-specific data.
The reporter learned that the national and local humanoid robot innovation center is for people's livelihood services, manufacturing, major national strategic needs and special environments, and plans to build 100 humanoid robot training fields in Shanghai in 2024. The so-called training field, that is, the data production and data scale site, will build real-time calibration system, control system, data acquisition system and data feedback system, generate synthetic data through digital twins, and create real and generated data through heterogeneous humanoid robots.
Fourier is known for the production of robot bodies, and its exoskeleton robots have been used in many applications in the field of medical rehabilitation. Gu Jie said that Fourier has been in active contact with application scenario providers and several large model manufacturers to build an industry ecosystem.
In addition, a number of industry insiders said that to promote the development of humanoid robots must find the right application scenarios, need to be application-driven research, can not be developed too broadly. In some environments where it is difficult for humans to complete work, such as vacuum, high temperature and high pressure, humanoid robots will have broad applications.
