Hengyu is from the Au Fei Temple
量子位 | 公众号 QbitAI
The bipedal robot track ushered in another player equipped with an AI model.
Westlake Robot, the transformation project of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory of Westlake University, was revealed to focus on the field of bipedal robots, and it is a version equipped with a GPT large model, with behavior/trajectory as the core.
At present, the company's approximate valuation in the market is around 1-200 million.
There is also news from the market that because it is transformed from Westlake University, its road to bipedal and large models has the blessing of many star laboratories in two branches.
At present, the team has released the pure action algorithm RobotBert, and applied it to the quadruped robot it has launched, as well as to various agents in the simulation environment.
In this way, I am afraid that it is not far from the advent of the embodied intelligence of the West Lake system? !
Uncover the true face of Lushan
In the robot track, West Lake Robot is not a pure novice.
According to the public information on the official website of Westlake University, Westlake Robotics was established in June 2021 and is "the first high-quality achievement transformation project in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics of Westlake University".
It is understood that the leader of Westlake Robotics is Wang Donglin, the head of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory (MiLAB) of Westlake University.
To a large extent, the company's robots are also based on the work direction of the laboratory, such as deep strong chemical Xi, deep meta-chemical Xi, robotics, etc.
However, unlike the current entry into the "bipedal + AI model", at the beginning of the establishment of West Lake Robot, the goal was to focus on quadruped robots.
According to the currently released promotional video, its quadruped robot body can complete some basic dexterous actions.
For example, forward:
And the backflip:
and doggy rolling(?):
Tasks such as going up stairs can also be covered better:
However, although they are not new entrants in the field of robotics, there are still many differences between quadruped robots and bipedal robots in terms of hardware ontology, algorithms, and landing scenarios.
In other words, the road faced by West Lake Robot on this track is not so easy to walk - especially in the context of the explosion of embodied intelligence this year and the entry of many outstanding players.
The news from the qubit inquiry, unlike the quadruped robot anchoring scientific research, electric power, shopping malls, airports and other fields, the bipedal robot that will be launched by Westlake Robot has re-chosen the aiming direction:
manufacturing field, or warehousing and handling scenarios.
According to the company, the company has just increased its registered capital and has had a wave of shareholder changes in December.
Who is behind the company?
As mentioned above, as an incubation project of Westlake University, the person behind Westlake Robotics is Wang Donglin, the head of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory.
According to public information, Wang Donglin graduated from the School of Electronic and Information Engineering of Xi'an Jiaotong University with a bachelor's degree and later obtained a doctorate degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Calgary in Canada.
His main research direction is the general behavioral intelligence of robots based on deep reinforcement Xi and meta-learning Xi, and he has published more than 100 papers in AI or robot summits such as IJCAI, AAAI, CVPR, IROS, KDD, CIKM, etc.
After graduating with a Ph.D., he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the iRadio Laboratory in Canada.
Since 2011, Wang Donglin has been working as an assistant associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the New York Institute of Technology.
Then, in 2017, Wang Donglin joined Westlake University.
In addition to the title of director of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory, Wang Donglin is also a tenured associate professor at Westlake University and a distinguished researcher in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the School of Engineering.
Wei Zhenyu, the legal representative of Westlake Robotics, is the co-founder and COO of this company.
Wei Zhenyu graduated from Harbin Engineering University with a bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree, and is currently an assistant researcher in the Machine Intelligence Laboratory of Westlake University, with his main research direction being general behavioral intelligence of robots.
It is rumored that after the West Lake Robot will incorporate embodied intelligence into the new plan, it will be led by Wang Donglin and combined with the strength of nearly 10 laboratories of Westlake University to form two lines to jointly build.
One line is responsible for the hardware side of the robot;
The other line is responsible for the AI side.
This is probably the envy of other embodied intelligence or bipedal robot companies in the same period......
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