Humanoid robots were still among the biggest crowd-pleasers at this year’s World Robot Conference (WRC) in Beijing, though other types of robots, such as wheeled machines, were gaining momentum as the industry moves from demonstration to deployment.
At Unitree Robotics’ packed booth at the conference, bipedal models played table tennis or squared off in fighting matches, showing off levels of speed, balance and coordination that the industry has only seen in the last few years.
But elsewhere across the exhibition halls, robots were sorting parcels, loading production lines, or moving materials. Many moved on wheels instead of legs, while others had conventional-looking robotic arms.
“If wheels can get the job done, do we really need two legs?” asked Yang Li, senior engineer of start-up X Square Robot.
Bipedal robots may be more impressive to spectators if they can punch, run and jump, but industrial users ultimately cared about factors such as payload, reliability and return on investment, he said.
During an hour-long, controlled test this month, a two-armed WALL-B embodied model designed by X Square Robot was able to sort 1,816 packages, according to the company. It said that it was more efficient than the bipedal Figure 03 robot, from US start-up Figure AI, which handled an average of 1,248 parcels an hour.
At the WRC, AI2 Robotics, another Chinese start-up, had a wheeled robot making coffee and ice cream for visitors. The machine used different end effectors for different jobs, with a gripper on one arm and a dexterous hand on the other.
Mo Lei, AI2 Robotics vice-president and head of strategy, said its robots had progressed from a single demonstration to performing multiple jobs for one customer and replicating similar tasks across different customers. In factories, he added, a more basic test was whether the same robot could reliably work for eight to 16 hours a day.
The shift to non-humanoids, however, does not indicate a decline in market enthusiasm for bipeds. Morgan Stanley data showed that half-size bipeds remained the largest category in China in the first half, accounting for 50% of shipments, followed by wheel-based humanoids at 29% and full-size bipeds at 21%.
But wheeled platforms were expanding rapidly in industrial and commercial settings because their greater stability made them a practical choice for manipulation and embodied-AI applications, the investment bank said.
Besides the form factor, the competition is also shifting from the body towards the robotic “brain”.
Unitree founder Wang Xingxing told the WRC that AI models had become the company’s biggest area of investment in terms of both capital and personnel. Its prospectus also earmarked 2.02bil yuan (US$300.52mil/RM1.21bil) for intelligent robot model research and development, accounting for nearly half of the 4.2bil yuan (RM2.52bil) it had originally planned to raise in its Shanghai initial public offering.
He said the biggest challenge was generalisation, for example, where a robot can complete tasks in an unpredictable environment, rather than simply performing scripted movements. That could happen in two or three years if progress was fast, he said.
At the same time, instead of a new robot, Unitree unveiled a seven-axis biomimetic robotic arm, R1, priced from 9,900 yuan (US$1,472/RM5,930).
Another challenge was data, as growing demand drives growth of relevant firms. Lumos Robotics, a robot maker, also provides data-collection equipment and data-processing services. Company founder and CEO Yu Chao said that the data-collection business contributes roughly half of its revenue.
Lumos is currently working with Mitsubishi Electric, one of its investors, on a robotic project involving assembly, packaging, material handling and inspection at Mitsubishi’s factories in China. What was more important than the number of robots Mitsubishi bought was the access it offered to data generated in a real factory environment, Yu said. – South China Morning Post
