Thick Planting "New Quality Productivity"|"Policy and Technology" Double Blessing Humanoid Robots Go to "Large Space"

Beijing, 15 Sep (Xinhua) -- On 15 September, the Economic Information Daily published an article entitled "Thick Cultivation of 'New Quality Productive Forces' | 'Policy and Technology' Double Blessing, Humanoid Robots Toward 'Big Space'." According to the article, "feet" jumped up the steps and walked steadily on grassy and muddy roads; "Fingers" freely hold bottles, grasp delivery basketballs, and even skillfully pull coffee flowers; With the blessing of the artificial intelligence large model, when you hear the command of "thirsty", you can turn around and walk to the refrigerator, take out a can of drink and hand it to humans... At present, humanoid robots with smart "minds" and flexible "limbs" are becoming a new track for multi-party competition for the future industry.

Industry insiders believe that humanoid robots are the aggregators of information, manufacturing, materials, energy, life and other technologies, involving new fields and high technology content, and their innovation and development contain huge productivity potential, which is expected to drive the emergence of new economic growth points. With the blessing of policy and technology, humanoid robots have huge application space in industry, medical care, home services and other fields, and it is estimated that by 2030, the market size of humanoid robots in mainland China is expected to reach about 870 billion yuan.

In the laboratory of Cloudminds Robot Co., Ltd., the "skeleton" of the humanoid robot "Little Ginger" is displayed, and more than 40 flexible joints are scattered throughout the neck, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hands, waist, knees, etc. They are the key to solving the "rigidity and insufficient flexibility" of traditional robots.

"Like people, it is the joints that determine the flexibility of robots. Every joint is inseparable from computing, communication and sensing. Huang Xiaoqing, founder of Cloudminds, told reporters that with reference to the design concept of smart phones, the company has independently developed intelligent flexible joints and achieved technological breakthroughs in many aspects such as mechanical structure and core algorithms. At the same time, the otherwise independent components are integrated together, just like many chips are integrated into a single circuit board.

Not only do joints need to be more flexible, but whole-body movement control is also crucial. In the laboratory of the School of Control Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University, the humanoid robot "Wukong-4" can jump 0.2 meters high steps and land smoothly, as well as up and down 25-degree slopes and 10-centimeter steps.

Zhu Qiuguo, associate professor of the School of Control of Zhejiang University, introduced that "Wukong-4" realizes the robot's three-dimensional environmental map construction and autonomous dynamic navigation, so that it can adapt to outdoor roads, grass, muddy roads and other terrain. "The increased range of motion, strength and speed means that the robot is more flexible, and walking like a human is an important step in exploring practical applications." He said.

At present, a number of domestic and foreign enterprises are accelerating the layout of humanoid robots. In October 2022, Tesla's robot - Optimus Optimus prototype was officially unveiled. At the 2023 World Robot Conference held recently, Xiaomi, UBTECH, Unitree Technology and other companies have exhibited humanoid robot products.

According to the International Association of Robotics, from 2021 to 2030, the global humanoid robot market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 71%. According to data from the Chinese Institute of Electronics, by 2030, the market size of humanoid robots in mainland China is expected to reach about 870 billion yuan.

But it should also be seen that the current technical level of humanoid robots still has a lot of room for exploration, just walking like a person is a problem for the industry, and a complete industrial ecology has not yet been formed, and the entire industry is in an early stage of development.

"It is not difficult for robots to make them 'human-like', but it is an extremely difficult task to achieve intelligence." Huang Xiaoqing believes that the breakthrough of general artificial intelligence technology has provided an important driving force for the innovative development of humanoid robots. The large model has sufficient basic knowledge, basic usable continuous dialogue and continuous interaction capabilities, and after accessing the intelligent multimodal interaction system of humanoid robots, it can significantly improve the autonomous decision-making ability of robots in practical application scenarios.

Taking the humanoid robot "Little Ginger" as an example, after accessing the robot multi-modal large model RobotGPT, it only needs to tell the "Little Ginger" what the task is, such as what color items to grab and what kind of action to complete, it can split the task action by itself, generate control instructions, and even correct the details of the action in real time.

"From the perspective of research and development, one of the development directions of future humanoid robots is the research of intelligent large models, and at the same time do research on the landing of small models in combination with demand." Zhu Qiuguo believes that the development of humanoid robots and artificial intelligence large models is in the opposite direction, and the future large model research is divided into three modules: front-end perception model, decision planning model and reinforcement learning model, and the three models are closely related, which is the key to the development of humanoid robots to be "smarter", so that it can perceive the physical world, judge command tasks from humans, understand people's life scenes, and engage in production, nursing, companionship and communication and other "work".

In fact, the continuous breakthrough of key technologies is inseparable from the mainland's continuous layout for the innovation and development of the robot industry. The "14th Five-Year Plan" Robot Industry Development Plan and "Robot +" Application Action Implementation Plan both make specific deployments to support the innovative development of the robot industry and promote the application of innovative robot products. Information from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows that the mainland has created national manufacturing innovation centers such as robot intelligent sensors and intelligent voices, organized unveiling of key problems, and promoted the adaptation of key software and hardware.

Looking forward to the future, the reporter learned that the mainland will further increase policy support, consolidate the technical foundation, promote the application of key industries, and promote the development of humanoid robot technology and industry.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that it will promote the introduction of guidance on the innovation and development of humanoid robots and clarify industrial development goals and key tasks. With the technological breakthrough of general artificial intelligence as the engine, make good use of the foundation of the development of industrial robot parts industry, and improve the supply capacity of key common technologies. Facing the needs of security, manufacturing, public services and other scenarios, promote the application of key industries. In addition, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other places have also introduced support measures to accelerate the layout around key technological innovations and industry demonstration applications.

In Zhu Qiuguo's view, humanoid robots are an important indicator to measure the level of scientific and technological innovation and high-end manufacturing, as the basic core technology continues to make breakthroughs, artificial intelligence technology brings new opportunities, production line robots, service robots and even household companion robots, etc. are humanoid robots with broad prospects for the application of the future. (Reporter Guo Qian, intern reporter Chen Hanyang)