"science and technology innovation board daily" september 2nd (editor song ziqiao) on august 30th local time, 1x technologies (1x for short), a robotics company bet by openai, announced the official launch of a bipedal humanoid robot prototype designed specifically for the family - neo beta.

neo is 5 feet 5 inches tall, about 1.65 meters, and weighs 30 kilograms. it walks at 2.5 miles per hour (1.12m/s) and runs at 7.5 miles per hour (3.35m/s). its hands have 20 degrees of freedom and can lift 70 kilograms, more than twice its own weight, and can carry objects weighing up to 20 kilograms. the operating time is short, only 2 to 4 hours (this may be a trade-off after the lightweight design).

the whole body of the robot is wrapped in fabric, which makes it look less "cold and hard". in addition to its appearance, it does not rely on traditional rigid actuators (which allows neo to remain quiet when performing tasks), but instead usesbionic designand more flexible components -its body is designed with a structure similar to human muscle tissue and a non-rigid hydraulic system, with a soft layer covering its aluminum core, making it strong yet flexible.

behind this is 1x's good intentions——integrate robots into family scenes and build neo into a general household robot.

the company stated on its official website that neo is a humanoid robot with a wide range of capabilities. they excel at industrial tasks in areas such as security, logistics, manufacturing, operating machinery and handling complex tasks. in the long run, the company hopes that neo can take care of household chores.

ceo and founder bernt børnich said he hopes neo can complete tasks that humans don’t like to do, such as cleaning, organizing and other daily chores, and can obey commands and customize according to user preferences and lifestyles.

according to 1x’s demonstration video, the household tasks that neo can currently perform are very simple, including: delivering items, making coffee, and organizing objects.

pass an egg

pass something

organize your items

make coffee

at the same time, neo has certain "social skills" and can complete actions such as saying hello, hugging people, and waving.

1x says that if a user needs help, neo’s vision and movements can be quickly taken over by a remote human operator.

according to official introduction,neo is currently in the beta testing phase and 1x will deploy a limited number of neos in selected households to collect data that is crucial in research and development.

after being tested in different scenarios and environments, neo will be mass-produced in a factory in norway.

about 1x: backed by openai, it once received $100 million in investment with just 13 ppts

founded in 2014, 1x has launched its wheeled robot eve in north america and norway, and has put it into fields such as logistics and security (guarding).

EVE

in 2022, 1x began to cooperate with openai to introduce language models and embodied learning models.

in march 2023, openai's venture fund became a shareholder of 1x through its a2 round of financing. in january this year, 1x received $100 million in series b financing with 13 slides introducing neo, led by swedish venture capital fund eqt ventures, with participation from new investor samsung next, existing investors sandwater, skagerak capital and nistad group.

in the process of robot training, rich data is very important. 1x said that expanding the data collection strategy of embodied intelligence and providing neo robots to consumers will be its next milestone. 1x also previously revealed that the series b financing will enable 1x to expand data collection, expand the scale of computing data for training ai, expand the scale of factories and mass-produce home robots.