From the history and development of humanoid robots, look at the "future trend" of artificial intelligence

In October last year, the American billionaire Musk once again attracted the attention of the world, and on that day, the prototype of the humanoid robot "Optimus" developed by Musk's research team was officially made public.

So, should robots "return" to human form? Could humanoid robots be the ultimate form of artificial intelligence? How far can scientists do humanoid robots?

Although it is difficult to have a clear answer to these questions at present, it can be seen that from Boston Dynamics' Atlas in the United States, Ameca of British robotics company Engineered Arts, to UBTECH's Walker and Xiaomi's CyberOne, humanoid robots are showing a booming trend.

Development and Results: Humanoid robots are already in a booming period

According to the definition of academia, general humanoid robots can be divided into large humanoid robots and small humanoid robots. Large humanoid robots generally refer to adult-size, mostly more than one meter tall, bipedal walking robots, which involves a lot of control, planning, mechatronics technology, a full range of AI perception technology, mobility ability and working range, human-computer interaction, etc.; Small humanoid robots are generally desktop.

For the development of humanoid robots, the industry generally defines them as three stages. The first stage is the early stage of development represented by humanoid robots at Waseda University; The second stage is the highly integrated development stage of the system represented by Honda's humanoid robot; The third stage is the highly dynamic motion development stage represented by Boston Dynamics humanoid robot.

First of all, the world's first humanoid robot WABOT-1 developed by Waseda University in Japan was born in 1967, the robot is about 2 meters tall, weighs 160 kilograms, including the limb control system, visual system and dialogue system, has human-like hands and legs, a total of 26 joints throughout the body, two cameras on the chest, and tactile sensors on the hands.

It is understood that WABOT-1 has about the same mobility as a one-and-a-half-year-old baby, and although it takes 45 seconds to walk and the pace is only about 10 centimeters, it is still enough to shock the world at that time. Its main author, Ichiro Kato, is also known as the "father of the world's humanoid robots".

Subsequently, ASIMO, born by Japan's Honda in 1986, is regarded as the leader of the second generation of humanoid robots. With a height of 130 cm, a weight of 48 kg, 57 joints and a maximum speed of 9km/h, it can achieve a series of complex sports such as trotting, jumping on one foot, going up and down stairs and playing football.

The ASIMO, which was originally planned for mass production, was "retired" in 2022 due to its high cost and too simple functions to bear the contextual dialogue function.

The Atlas prototype born by Boston Dynamics in 2009 was officially released to the public in July 2013, after several optimization designs, the new generation of Atlas is 150 cm tall, weighs 81.6 kg, has 28 joints throughout the body, can reach a speed of 1.5m/s, can complete a series of complex movements such as fast trotting, triple jump, backflip and aerial gymnastics, and is considered to be the humanoid robot closest to humans in terms of movement.

In addition, Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus was unveiled in October 2022, with a height of 171 centimeters, a weight of 56.6 kilograms, and can handle items weighing about 20 kilograms and walking at a speed of about 8 kilometers per hour. Not only in terms of movement, its brain also uses Tesla's supercomputer system Dojo, which has super computing power.

Committed to scenario-based applications, humanoid robots have unlimited potential

Although many humanoid robot works have appeared so far, when it comes to the commercialization of humanoid robots, it seems that there is still no future, mainly because the current humanoid robots are difficult to reach the level of "intelligence" acceptable to humans, after all, robots with independent thinking ability currently only exist in science fiction films.

Perception-cognition-decision-execution, this series of capabilities, each of which is a huge challenge, needs to complete technical breakthroughs, and on top of this, how to make robots have human logical thinking ability, and even simulate human emotions and feelings, is to take longer to make a breakthrough in accounting algorithms to achieve.

However, if there is demand, there must be corresponding research and development, which does not affect the scientific research enthusiasm of large manufacturers at home and abroad.

Just last August, in Xiaomi's autumn new product conference, the first full-size humanoid bionic robot CyberOne was also officially unveiled, with the stage name "Tie Da", "Tie Da" is 177 cm tall, weighs 52 public, can perceive 45 human semantic emotions, and distinguish 85 environmental semantics. In addition, it is equipped with Xiaomi's self-developed whole body control algorithm, which can coordinate the movement of 21 joints; Equipped with the Mi Sense visual space system, which can reconstruct the real world in three dimensions. It has developed "cerebellum", can achieve bipedal sports posture balance, strong limbs, power peak torque of 300Nm and other leading technical capabilities.

According to Tianyan data, in recent years, robots and cutting-edge technology industries, such as big data, artificial intelligence, etc. have become more and more closely integrated, especially the emergence of humanoid robots, so that robots as a technology industry "technology" content is increasingly increasing. From the perspective of quantity, domestic robot patents have maintained steady growth, with more than 23,000 patents applied for in 2022; from the perspective of type, invention patents and utility models account for a relatively high proportion, and the sum of the two accounts for 90% of the total.

It can be seen that although in terms of technology, scientific research and other perspectives, the research and development and commercialization of humanoid robots can be described as "heavy and long", but this still cannot resist the continuous growth of the concept of humanoid robots and new products, and related research and development and patents are showing an unprecedented growth trend.

In fact, technology with the results to the market, its biggest purpose and hope is to be able to achieve scenario-based applications, can help people to process and complete part of the work, which requires the level of AI technology associated with humanoid robots to reach a higher degree, it is artificial intelligence that gives robots more complex and subdivided interaction, work and other scene application capabilities, and whether humanoid robots will eventually be the ultimate form of artificial intelligence technology, you need to be patient.

This article is derived from financial world information