Hyundai, who is "not doing business", has come to show off its muscles again, this time they launched a seemingly unremarkable mobile platform, and at first glance I thought it was a scaled-down version of the pure electric platform, or maybe it was inspired by this.
Go shopping later and take it with you
In fact, this is a modern four-wheeled robot, MobED (Mobile Eccentric Droid).
Its main body is a flat rectangular platform on which to place various tools, and four 12-inch pneumatic tires. Each tire is equipped with three motors that can be controlled independently.
With these motors and complex suspension systems, MobED is able to adjust the angle and travel path of the platform with extraordinary precision and stability, maintaining extreme balance even when driving on uneven surfaces or ramps.
In order to show this feature, Hyundai designed MobED in the opening position to "carry the champagne tower uphill" eye-catching drama, which has the feeling of a Jackie Chan movie.
Currently, the device can be operated autonomously or remotely, designed to handle objects, but ultimately it can be used to "move" people.
In the demo video, MobED can be turned into a stroller and mobile display by installing expansion accessories. It is reported that the big director Steven Spielberg also used it as a camera gimbal, shooting long-term tracking shots.
Dong Jin Hyun, head of Hyundai Motor Group's robotics laboratory, said in a statement:
We developed the MobED platform to overcome the limitations of existing indoor guidance and service robots, while maximizing its usefulness in the city by upgrading the overall mobility of the platform. We're also curious about how potential users of MobED will expand their demands and capabilities for the platform.
The robot has a top speed of 30 km/h, a built-in 2Wh battery, and a fully charged mobED that can support mobED for four hours.
However, how it will be carried out is still a mystery, Hyundai did not mention anything related to sensors in the press release, nor did it say whether it has the ability to drive itself, but from the demonstration video, MobED has a high degree of practicality.
Rome was not built in a day. Modern companies that are very powerful in making cars have already achieved success in the field of robotics, after all, in the manufacturing process, car building and robot building have a lot in common.
Hyundai has also launched many robot concept products, such as the Tiger X-1, which is specially built for extraterrestrial environments, which has a rover-like appearance because their production concept is very similar, all built for extreme environments, highlighting a durable and lightweight. It does not have a cockpit, but instead uses a modular design to help humans carry and carry tools through difficult terrain.
Where man can go, he can go; where man cannot go, send it. It is with a restless heart that Hyundai not only set up a division dedicated to robotics, New Horizons Studios, but also acquired an 80% stake in Boston Dynamics from Japan's SoftBank for $1.1 billion earlier this year.
Now it seems that robots are the fragrant food of the future manufacturing industry, and modern long-term investment in this industry can also be regarded as a precaution.
Less versatile robots have more advantages than disadvantages
The reason why robots are fragrant, look at the news of industrial upgrading in recent years, you can perceive. Bain & Company released a Labor 2030 report in 2018, which mentioned that in the 2020s, current jobs will be reduced by 20-25% due to the wave of automation.
▲ Image source: Bain.com
Today, we are already alive in the early 2020s, and the number of people on the job world has plummeted under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The fact is that there are fewer workers, but the jobs are still there, and under the cloud of the virus, this situation is difficult to be reversed in a short period of time, but life will continue, so in the manufacturing industry, the automation process is accelerated. The reality isn't exactly what Labor 2030 says, but the wave of automation is indeed irreversible.
The modular design proposed by MobED has reference value for the entire field of robotics, but this design is not a modern initiative, similar to mobile platform robots have long been widely used in the logistics industry.
Most of these robots appear at the logistics and warehousing end, consisting of moving car bodies and load pallets and other components, which shuttle between storage racks and cooperate with mechanical arms to carry out tasks such as picking up goods, mixing, short-distance transportation, etc., and the handling efficiency is often 3-4 times that of people. Some robots will add visual recognition equipment such as scanners and cameras on the basis of the original mobile car body to count the goods and send replenishment notifications to the background.
Is it bad that these were originally human jobs and are now being replaced by this silicon-based organism? For those individuals who have been laid off, this is of course a heavy piece of bad news, but from the perspective of social processes, this is inevitable, and it is difficult to say whether it is good or bad.
However, at present, it seems that the work that robots can do is still some rough work, full automation is still far from mature, and in the face of some fine work, the advantages of people are still there.
Robots don't have to be human-like
In recent years, the direction of robot development work has undergone some subtle changes, simply put, the focus of gravity has shifted from humanoid to non-human. About ten years ago, we saw the news about robots, and the pictures were basically humanoid dancing robots, and their use was mostly only for entertaining the public.
The humanoid robots that have recently appeared in our field of vision are mainly realizing the function of healing humans, whether it is Disney's Groot or the robot nurse Grace, the core is entertainment and emotional healing.
▲ Nursing robot Grace, image source: Evening Standard
Boston Dynamics' Altas has great flexibility, with a strong balance, he even learned parkour, but still more entertaining than practical.
At the other end of the world of robotics, non-humanoid robots are thriving and have long been engaged in the work of serving humans. In addition to the aforementioned Mobed and various types of storage robots, there are also bomb disposal robots, atomization disinfection robots, and sweeping robots.
Their appearance is far from that of humans, but they have become more practical, and in the past people always wanted to make robots look like humans, but due to their form, many functions could not be realized.
Thinking a little bit now, robots are becoming more practical than ever. We're used to translating the word Robot as a robot, but robots don't have to be human-like. Developers jump out of the original framework of thinking, so that the robot has a richer form, from the beginning of the design to think of the functionality, and then consider the corresponding best form, which has become the mainstream development logic in the current field of robotics, it seems that this is more reasonable.
However, with the development of sensors, visual recognition, materials science, mechanics and other technologies, the design direction of robots may once again move closer to the human form.
After all, this modern society is built by humans, and the machinery, facilities, tools, etc. we use are designed according to human habits, and robots are not exempt.