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Zhidongxi (public account:zhidxcom）
authorVanilla Yunpeng
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Play mahjong, open packages, thread buttons, and even lift 30KG of weights!

After a year of silence, Zhihuijun made a strong comeback with his second-generation robot family, showing off various new skills that were eye-catching.

Zhidongxi reported on August 18th, today,"Wild Iron Man" ZhihuijunShow one after another5 types of Zhiyuan humanoid robots, the whole process is full of activities, with robots opening bottle caps, pouring Coke, and moving heavy objects in the front, and robots hosting, threading needles, playing mahjong, and selling cars in the back. Finally, there is a touching growth Vlog of the old father Zhihui accompanying the "clip phone robot baby" to take its first steps, and throwing out "0 yuan purchase"The ultimate move.

Zhiyuan not only defines for the first timeFive-level technology evolution roadmap for embodied intelligence, and announced the latest commercialization progress: the team has done a lot of forward design analysis, system solution reconstruction, and self-research of core components for mass production; large-scale mass production of the Expedition series products is underway, and a large number of orders have been received from different customers such as the manufacturing industry and interactive service industry. The entire team is working overtime to prepare for mass delivery.

Zhihui also showed off his grand vision, transforming himself into the "Cyber ​​God". From data sets, design drawings, software frameworks, middleware source codes to operation and control algorithms, all were open source, so that everyone can build humanoid robots.

Zhiyuan Robotics has released theexpedition"and"Telepathy"Two series, a total of 5 new commercial robots, includingYuanzheng A2, Yuanzheng A2-W, Yuanzheng A2-Max, Lingxi X1as well asLingxi X1-W。

At the beginning of the press conference, Zhihuijun performed a "human-machine sketch" with several members of the Expedition A2 robot family.

The Expedition A2 series showed off many new skills, such as the Expedition A2-W robot using a bottle opener to open a Coke bottle, operating a juicer to make a cup of "Portuguese Coke", and accurately pouring the drink from the juicer into a cup.

The "Hercules" A2-Max lifted a weight of more than 80 kilograms on the spot. Overall, the robot's body movements were smooth and agile, and it was obviously much more skilled than when it first appeared in August last year, but the movements were indeed a bit too slow. It took a full 3 minutes just to make a drink.

After performing the skit, Zhihui turned around and walked into the press conference. An Expedition A2 robot took the stage as the host and introduced the Expedition A2 series robot family.

Expedition A2 series includesExpedition A2, Expedition A2-WandExpedition A2-MaxThree robots, respectively forInteractive services, flexible manufacturingandHeavy load specialThe scene has an embedded large language model, which can realize super-human voice conversation and various skills can be continuously learned.

//oss.zhidx.com/uploads/2024/08/66c1765ba7ac5_66c1765b9bb6e_66c1765b9bb4d_voice interaction.mp4

▲Live demonstration of Yuanzheng A2 voice interaction

As the "One More Thing", Zhihui Jun showed hisThe first modular robot Lingxi X1It is small in size and can be regarded as a "youth version" robot, with significant cost optimization.

Zhihui Jun ledLess than 10 peopleThe team, inLess than 3 monthsIn just 10 minutes, Lingxi X1 was turned from a concept into a complete device. It took less than two weeks from the time Lingxi X1 was assembled to today, so it was “not even a month old before we started working on it”.

It is worth mentioning that Lingxi X1 has a "Machine mode", the mobile phone can be directly placed in the robot and serve as the "brain" of the robot. This "brain hole" is indeed big enough.

The screen of Lingxi X1 can be customized, for example, to show Zhihuijun’s own face, giving a sense of déjà vu as if a robot has been equipped with Vision Pro.

In order to avoid a "price war", Zhihui directly priced Lingxi X1 at "0 yuan" and made it fully open source.

In terms of application scenarios, Yuanzheng A2 can serve as a sales guide in 4S stores, communicate in multiple languages, and understand user needs. For example, when it hears that a customer wants to drink water, it can go and get water, and it can automatically avoid obstacles on the road. In factories, Yuanzheng A2 can basically complete tasks such as quality inspection and loading, and placing goods on shelves.

1. Whole body40+Active degrees of freedom, dexterous hands19Degrees of freedom, four sub-domain core systems

Humanoid RobotExpedition A2The entire body adopts an exoskeleton design, and its height and weight are similar to those of an adult human. It can last for more than 2 hours and walk at a speed of 1 meter per second.

In terms of appearance, the Expedition A2 is more human-like than the previous generation Expedition A1, with a rounder head, more coordinated limbs, and the leg shape has changed from the reverse knee flexion design of the A1 to a positive knee flexion.

Expedition A2-WIt consists of a humanoid upper body and a mechanical body on the back. It is mainly used in the field of industrial manufacturing. It has 22 active degrees of freedom, a battery life of more than 5 hours, and can walk more than 1.5 meters per second. Dual-arm writing, multi-modal perception, and sustained operation are targeted optimizations of the Yuanzheng A2-W for manufacturing scenarios.

Expedition A2-MaxIts biggest feature is its immense strength. It has 53 active degrees of freedom, and its arms can weigh more than 80 kilograms.

The industrial design of the Expedition A2 series products adopts a family ID language, which helps to achieve mass production and unique visual recognition features.

In terms of core components, the Yuanzheng A2 series draws on the systems of new energy vehicles and divides the core systems of the robot intoPower domain, perception domain, communication domain, control domainFour subdomains.

existPower DomainIn terms of mass production, the joint module of Yuanzheng A2 has undergone a lot of optimization and testing based on the previous generation. The peak torque of some joint motors can reach 512 Nm.

Visual-tactile dexterityIt has also been fully upgraded and has 19 degrees of freedom, 12 of which are active joints.

Based on flexible hand joints and visual and tactile perception, dexterous hands can now easily tighten screws and open express packages.

Grabbing general items is a piece of cake, and you can even use both hands to pour water.

Delicate work like button threading can be easily accomplished by dexterous hands.

Yuanzheng A2 has 7 degrees of freedom in both arms, with a single arm having 3+2+2+N degrees of freedom and a wingspan of 60 cm. Both arms have built-in six-dimensional force sensors, which can be used to achieve more complex operations.

Perception DomainIn terms of navigation, the Yuanzheng A2 has added sensors such as laser radar and panoramic cameras to achieve global safety and local obstacle avoidance. Based on the self-developed system algorithm, the robot's understanding of the environment has also been greatly improved.

Communication domainIn terms ofAimRT, an intelligent robot communication framework, you don’t need to rely on any third-party middleware.

It is worth mentioning that this framework will beFully open source at the end of next month。

Control DomainIn terms of robot movement, Expedition A2 has added a data-driven Learning base based on last year's Model base, using two methods to jointly drive the robot's behavior optimization, making walking more stable and natural.

At the motion algorithm level, Zhiyuan has built an AgentOS that is driven by a natural language instruction set and can adapt to different robot hardware.

Based on the robot body, AgentOS defines a skill library, defines the robot's state through a multimodal large model, and then uses the task executor to drive various atomic skills to perform task operations, and then provides feedback to obtain the signal.

AgentOS is still in the early stages of pre-research, but judging from the homemade beverage demonstration at the beginning, it has already achieved a relatively good task orchestration effect.

The overall framework of Yuanzheng A2 is built with reference to reinforcement learning. The entire robot is a very complex system of software and hardware, which involves the coordination and deployment of various internal hardware modules, and also requires efficient cooperation between software and algorithms.

Zhiyuan builtOpen software and hardware platform AIMA, opening up the secondary development capabilities of the complex system of Expedition A2 to more external developers to jointly build the entire ecosystem.

2. Interactive services and flexible manufacturing are implemented, and the entire process of self-developed data collection is open source

Zhihui Jun first announced the Zhiyuan robotEmbodied Intelligence Technology Evolution Roadmap, from G1 to G5 correspond toBasic automation, general atomic skills, end-to-end operation skills, end-to-end operation big modeland finallyAGI, similar to the L1, L2, and L3 levels in the field of autonomous driving.

Over the past year, Zhiyuan Robotics has been conducting parallel research and development in the G2 and G3 stages, among which the atomic capabilities based on G2 have been put into practical application in actual scenarios.

For example,Interactive service scenariosIn the car industry, Yuanzheng A2 can conduct targeted marketing for customers. In the car 4S store, it can serve as a shopping guide to provide services to customers. Based on its memory ability, Yuanzheng A2 can know which car the customer liked last time and actively recommend it to experience.

Based on a multi-modal large model, Yuanzheng A2 can accurately identify commands with different intentions. For example, when a child says she is thirsty, Yuanzheng A2 will proactively ask what kind of drink she needs and bring it back to her.

While moving, the Expedition A2 can also intelligently avoid obstacles and avoid people or objects it encounters.

Based on the language action model, Yuanzheng A2 can generate natural actions end-to-end. For example, when saying "10,000 cash discount", it naturally made a 1 gesture.

Although from the perspective of the evolution of humanoid robots, Expedition A2 has made great progress, but with its current slow speaking and working efficiency, it is still far from replacing human sales.

existFlexible manufacturing scenariosIn the robot, Yuanzheng A2-W can realize workpiece feeding, loading and unloading, quality inspection, and transportation based on multimodal perception, dual-arm collaboration, atomic modularization and other capabilities, and can also automatically transfer between different processes.

AIDEA, the embodied intelligent data systemThis is another key move made by Zhihuijun, including simulation platform, machine learning platform, function deployment platform and data platform. It can be said to be the key foundation for Zhiyuan Robot to move from laboratory to factory and then to mass production and commercial use.

A big pain point in the embodiment field is the scarcity of real scene data. It is not like the large language model that has a large amount of free data on the Internet, nor is it like the real data collected by millions of cars on the road every day for autonomous driving.

In order to solve this pain point, Zhiyuan developed its own embodied intelligent data system AIDEA, forming a full-process stable and reliable data collection solution.

AIDEA will fully open source one million real machine and tens of millions simulation data sets in Q4 of this year. In addition, in the second half of this year, Zhiyuan will deploy more than 100 robots specifically for data collection.

3. The first modular robot Lingxi X1 was unveiled.teamLess than 10 people, from concept to complete machine in 2 months

At the end of the press conference, Zhihui also brought aOne more thing：Zhiyuan RobotThe first modular robot Lingxi X1, hidden in the box held up by Yuanzheng A2-Max at the beginning of the press conference.

Lingxi X1Zhiyuan X-LabThis is a new laboratory established by Zhiyuan in June, also called "Zhihuijun Laboratory", specializing in cutting-edge technology innovation research. This Lingxi X1 is made byLess than 10 people,existMore than two monthswithin the timeSelf-developed from scratchGot it.

Lingxi X1 is 133cm tall and weighs less than 66kg, which is very compact. Its arm uses a series-parallel hybrid structure, and the whole arm weighs only 2kg, which allows it to support more flexible movements and more efficient control.

Lingxi X1 also innovatively launched the "Machine mode", that is, robot + mobile phone, putting the mobile phone in the "head" of the robot to serve as the brain, so that the mobile phone's own hardware such as microphone, speaker, screen, as well as software capabilities such as network and AI computing power can bring new breakthroughs to the robot.

Through the various R&D experiences accumulated on the Expedition series, Lingxi X1 has also developed two new joints. Its more than 30 degrees of freedom throughout the body are supported by these two joints, achieving the ultimate in standardization.

Lingxi X1 also launched a robot for data collectionLingxi X1-W, which is lower in cost than the Expedition A2-W.

Just like Zhihui himself, Zhiyuan Robotics has always been committed to open source. The main body design drawings, software framework, middleware source code, and basic operation and control algorithms of Lingxi X1 will all be open source.

4. After a year of silence, Huawei's young genius "does great things quietly"

It has been exactly one year since the release of Zhiyuan Robotics' first humanoid robot, the Expedition A1. If the Expedition A1 was a breakthrough from zero to one, then the newly released Expedition A2 is an important step on the road from 1 to 100 AGI.

Zhiyuan Robotics was founded in February last year and is committed to developing embodied intelligent robot products and application ecosystems. With the halo of one of its founders, Zhihuijun, Zhiyuan Robotics has attracted much attention from the technology circle since its inception.

Zhihuijun's real name is Peng Zhihui. He graduated with a bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. After graduation, he worked as an algorithm engineer in the AI ​​Laboratory of OPPO Research Institute. Then in 2020, he joined the "Huawei Genius Youth Program" and engaged in research related to Ascend AI chips and AI algorithms.

There were a total of 6 Huawei genius teenagers that year.

▲Zhihui Junhua signs a contract for a talented young man

Another identity of Zhihuijun is a well-known up-host in the technology circle, who is famous for a series of hardcore technology product videos released on Bilibili.

In the video, he is proficient in both hardware and software, doing everything from writing code and drawing circuit diagrams to modeling and assembling. He independently made interesting projects such as the Iron Man robotic arm that sews stitches on grapes, a bicycle that can "walk by itself" without falling, and a modular mechanical keyboard.

▲Zhihuijun's B station homepage

In December 2022, Zhihuijun announced that he had resigned from Huawei to start his own business. In February of the following year, he officially established Zhiyuan Robotics (Shanghai Zhiyuan New Technology Co., Ltd.) and served as CTO and chief architect as one of the co-founders.

Zhiyuan Robotics is also favored by capital and has completed its A3 round of financing. Investors include BYD, BV Baidu Ventures, Sequoia China, Hillhouse Capital and other well-known companies or institutions. Its valuation exceeded US$1 billion as early as last year, making it a unicorn.

Conclusion: The humanoid robot star unicorn makes a big comeback

Just last week, the American humanoid robot startup Figure released its second-generation robot, Figure 02, aiming to be the "most powerful humanoid robot on earth." The fourth-generation Figure 02 has 16 degrees of freedom, 5 more than Tesla's Optimus Prime II, while the Expedition A2 has 19 more.

In the era of self-media, Zhihui Jun often "does great things quietly", and completes a project in half a year to amaze the audience. In the past year, Zhiyuan Robot has been relatively low-key. This time, after a year, Zhihui Jun held a press conference again, and he did not disappoint everyone. Not only did he launch the super-powerful Yuanzheng A2 family bucket, but he also brought the surprise new product Lingxi X1. The on-site demonstration alone has already defeated more than half of similar products.

In terms of ecology, Zhiyuan seems to be taking the same open source route as Zhihuijun himself, allowing more developers to participate and jointly contribute to the iteration of Yuanzheng A2 and Lingxi X1.