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Editor: Editorial Department

【New Wisdom Introduction】After 5 months, a humanoid robot with performance comparable to Optimus Prime was born! It looks more human, works more intelligently, and is fully independently developed, which can be said to be a perfect fusion of technology and humanity.

There are so many "people" at the 2024 World Robot Conference.

Humanoid robots from all over the industry came and showed off their unique skills on the spot, performing all kinds of tricks, which was simply a feast for the eyes.

The Navigator 2 NAVIAI attracted a large crowd of onlookers as soon as it made its debut.

Its creator, Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, attended the conference as the domestic industry leader.

The robot exhibition area was tightly surrounded both inside and outside the circle, and the audience on site took out their mobile phones to take photos as souvenirs.

The live sales of water are also very professional. As the banner behind shows - "Lie down and start with a humanoid robot."

At the conference, it also demonstrated various skills for the audience, including public speaking, making tea, and playing chess. Its movements were so smooth that they amazed everyone.

In the past, we would always exclaim in envy when we saw Optimus Prime folding clothes and sorting batteries, or Figure moving things in the warehouse.

Today we know that domestic robots are no less impressive than ours! They are a perfect blend of technology and humanity!

Even the foreigners present couldn't help but give NAVIAI a thumbs up.

A 1.65-meter-tall robot gives you human-like emotional value

If you look closely, you will see that the heavyweight player at the World Robot Conference - NAVIAI, the Navigator 2, has a form that is incredibly close to that of humans.

It is 1.65 meters tall and weighs about 60 kilograms. The overall size and proportions are designed with reference to humans, which greatly enhances its anthropomorphism and affinity.

Before Navigator 2, there was Navigator 1, which was 1.5 meters tall and weighed 50 kilograms. It could complete simple actions such as wiping tables and pouring tea and water.

When it evolved to No. 2, the robot became visibly stronger!

Why are its movements so anthropomorphic?

This is because it focuses on breakthroughs in embodied intelligence technologies such as data generation, behavioral decision-making, and underlying control, further improving the execution capabilities of anthropomorphic action mapping.

Therefore, it can successfully realize robust anthropomorphic movements with 41 degrees of freedom of the whole body, including arms, hands, head and neck, and it can also be easily deployed to achieve precise control.

This design not only allows robots to better adapt to various working spaces in human life, but also meets the spiritual demands in service and companionship scenarios.

Can robots establish a closer, more natural emotional connection with users?

Countless cases tell us that this is possible.

What's more, the robot in front of us is so human-like in appearance. Therefore, it can complete more humanistic human-computer interaction tasks such as playing chess and pouring tea.

In this way, robots will be closer to human life and allow us to feel the emotional value of "human-like".

The king of brains, the host on the scene

Not only that, the Navigator 2 NAVIAI is also very eloquent.

Right on the spot, it transformed itself into the "host" and gave a vivid self-introduction, which made the audience burst into cheers.

In addition, it also demonstrated its super high learning ability on the spot.

It quickly learned new movements and achieved stable standing under continuous movement of the high-degree-of-freedom working arm.

This is because it uses anthropomorphic full-body imitation learning, which can be achieved through latent space optimization and fusion model predictive control actions.

What surprised the audience even more was that NAVIAI's reaction speed was so fast.

This is because its AI computing power has reached 275Tops, which means that it has a computing power of 275 trillion times per second.

The greater the computing power, the faster the system reacts, and the faster it can respond and process various computing tasks.

Different from the traditional impression that "technology is cold", it seems not only a robot, but also an individual with warmth.

It can be imagined that after entering the family, it will be a warm companion in human's future life.

In the fields of education, training, exhibitions, customer service, etc., it will also unleash unlimited potential and bring about broad application scenarios.

As you can imagine, we can immerse ourselves in a vivid and colorful speech class at home without leaving our homes!

Acting as a salesperson on the spot, his working ability shocked the audience

At the exhibition, NAVIAI has another identity - a salesperson!

Although the exhibition was packed with people, it was not at all stage frightened.

After the operation, the audience couldn't help but sigh: this robot not only looks like a human, but its intelligent interactive operations are also so human-like.

This is because the humanoid embodied intelligent navigation of Navigator 2 NAVIAI adopts a decision-making and planning framework that combines a large model with reinforcement learning.

This global topological map provides a compact representation of the environment for large models and reinforcement learning decisions, guiding the robot to gradually move towards the target location.

Therefore, it is able to take into account both user instructions and open space perception.

Even in open and mixed scenarios, it can still perform robust semantic interactions and complete complex tasks such as long-sequence desktop organization.

In home and service scenarios, there are many open and cluttered situations. To this end, engineers proposed an object grasping strategy based on language-vision-action joint modeling, which greatly improved the success rate of grasping the target object.

Helping humans clean the house is a difficult problem for robots. Engineers proposed a multi-loop learning strategy that integrates perception errors. The robot can solve the problems of not being able to see clearly, grasp, or release.

In this way, the accuracy of robots' work in home services can be greatly improved, and users will experience unprecedented intelligence.

Moreover, the operating scenarios of NAVIAI Navigator 2 are also very flexible and diverse.

It can easily handle the assembly of power strips and screwing of cabinets in industrial scenes. The visual servo accuracy error is less than 0.1mm, which can fully meet the application requirements of industrial scenes.

Any texture scene, target pose, grasping error, etc. can be quickly deployed

The 41 degrees of freedom throughout the body make its movements more convenient and its operating range wider.

In addition, its arms also have an innovative design.

It can be seen that while maintaining the anthropomorphic size, its arm drive has an integrated design.

In this way, the servo drive of all the joints of the arm is transferred from the body to the arm itself.

This improves the degree of modularity and is more conducive to subsequent batch assembly and operation and maintenance.

Moreover, the robot's arms have the ability to perform precise operations, and each arm can carry a weight of 5 kg.

It is worth mentioning that the Navigator-2 NAVIAI is equipped with a generalizable high-precision and high-reliability vision fusion servo (which has been put into industrial applications).

Not only can it complete high-precision jacks in industrial scenarios.

It can also achieve a shaft-hole matching tolerance of less than 0.1mm, with a success rate of 99.99% after training for 1 hour (both training efficiency and success rate are better than DeepMind).

It can be said that it is this flexible operating ability that makes humanoid robots officially become members of human society!

Humanoid robots are accelerating from science fiction to reality

In the past year, the robotics sector has emerged as a new force, with domestic and foreign startups, universities, and national teams scrambling to place bets.

There is ALOHA who can cook a full banquet, Figure 02 and Optimus Prime who work in the workshop, as well as Yushu G1 and Boston Dynamics Atlas who show off their crazy skills.

In the field of robotics, there has begun to be a trend of a hundred schools of thought contending with each other.

Moreover, the past evolutionary process shows us that humanoid robots are gradually transitioning from the cognitive era, the development era, to the humanistic era.

In other words, the era of humanoid robots 3.0 has arrived.

The industry generally predicts that 2024 will be the "first year" for the implementation of robots, and will witness various companies entering the trial stage of mass production and commercialization.

It is no longer a machine that is kept on the shelf. It has gradually moved from the laboratory to the industry and then into thousands of households.

In particular, robotics technology is shifting from the industrial field to the lives of ordinary consumers, including services, medical care, education, and family.

According to the China Statistical Yearbook, the number of people living alone in China has exceeded 92 million in 2021. On the other hand, as the aging stage deepens, the companionship of the elderly has also become a major social issue.

Humanoid robots have become a hope that people place their hopes on.

It can provide comprehensive value to humans in terms of service experience and even emotional care, for example, it can communicate and interact in a human-like way and do housework.

This transformation also reflects the integration of science and technology with humanities.

Full stack independent research and development, industry leading

In contrast, in China, the humanoid robot industry is booming, which brings both opportunities and challenges.

In addition to enterprises, local governments have taken the lead in establishing similar humanoid robot innovation centers.

Among them, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, as the three core cities of the robotics industry, are leading the way.

According to the "Guiding Opinions on the Innovation and Development of Humanoid Robots" issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, "By 2025, my country's humanoid robot innovation system will be initially established, and the complete robot products will reach the international advanced level and achieve mass production."

By the end of 2023, Professor Xiong Rong and her team will work with a number of well-known industry parties to jointly build the "Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center".

In order to break the monopoly, the Innovation Center has maintained its leading position in the field of domestic humanoid robot innovation and development with its full-stack independent research and development and self-control capabilities.

While promoting the development of the entire machine, the Innovation Center also brings together the forces of all parties to jointly tackle the research and development of core components and provide application scenarios and promotion.

This also means that it will provide favorable support for the research and development and industrialization of humanoid robots, and help form a large-scale industrial cluster.

Start sprinting and become a humanoid robot leader

The appearance of NAVIAI No. 2 at the conference represents that this "national team" has once again delivered a perfect answer!

This is the Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, which achieves the integration of technology and humanistic innovation through 100% self-developed parts.

All these achievements are inseparable from the efforts of the team behind the scenes.

Founded in December 23, the Innovation Center is committed to becoming a leader in the field of humanoid robots.

At present, the innovation center has gathered top talents in the field of humanoid robots from home and abroad, including Zhejiang University, Peking University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Imperial College London and other universities.

Among them, 35% have PhDs and 31% have Masters degrees.

The team has built up the ability to independently develop a full range of humanoid robots, including industrial design, mechanical structure, and electrical hardware.

It is worth mentioning that the entire system of Navigator 1 was independently developed by the team and is the result of eighteen years of hard work.

In 2006, they developed a small anti-human football robot; from 2008 to 2011, they developed a humanoid table tennis playing robot; after that, they completed many attempts at innovation until the release of the first generation of NAVIAI.

After five months of iteration, NAVIAI has taken a step closer to possessing human-like capabilities, both in appearance and technical details.

It is reported that the second-generation NAVIAI has been put into use in actual industrial scenarios.

Not only that, based on the strategy of continuous self-evolution, Navigator 2 constantly learns from new data and adapts to different environmental changes, and is expected to be implemented on a large scale in leading industries/enterprises.

When robots are no longer cold machines, but achieve human-like innovative development from the inside out, a new type of humanoid robot that is more friendly and can bring emotional value to humans will lead the new development direction of the future humanoid robot industry.

We expect that in the future the innovation center will be able to create its own starry sky.