Due to the epidemic, we regret to miss the opportunity to experience CyberDog, that is, the robot dog iron egg, for the first time at xiaomi headquarters in Beijing. Recently, taking advantage of the Xiaomi CyberDog to open a national store tour, I "took advantage of the convenience of my position" and had the opportunity to experience it in depth.
Indeed, there is the long-established Boston Dynamics "net red" robot dog Spot, followed by the "pioneer cow" of UBTECH on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala, the "beliver" of Yushu Technology, and the Tencent robot dog Max... Although Xiaomi has more attributes of national brands than them, it is not unusual for robot dogs, so what can the birth of the iron egg bring to Xiaomi and the bionic robot industry?
What can be done at this stage
From the appearance, the iron egg is generally more uniform in appearance and body shape than other robot dogs.
The body shape is similar to that of a medium-sized dog, with a head, eyes, tail, and limbs. According to Xiaomi's official data, the weight is 14 kilograms, which is similar to that of a dog, but fortunately it will not gain weight.
So what can the Iron Egg do? A series of actions such as walking, lying down, running, rolling, shaking hands, dancing, turning in circles, and making strokes are difficult to defeat it, and it can be played for a long time.
Of course, the iron egg can not only do these actions so simple, it also supports the function of autonomous recognition and following. After selecting the target to be followed by the iron egg, it will look for the owner, and wherever the owner goes, it will follow it, and it can be bypassed when encountering obstacles on the way, and it is not a problem to take the iron egg out for a walk.
At the same time, iron eggs are more obedient than real dogs. Like other products of the Xiaomi ecological chain, the iron egg built-in Xiao Ai classmates, but the wake word has become "iron egg iron egg", the above commands can be achieved through voice commands, and at the same time, you can also control the smart devices at home like Xiao Ai classmates.
In addition to voice, there are special apps that can control the iron egg. Although this APP is still under development, the interface is not beautiful at all, but its functions have been relatively complete, there is no threshold for use.
On both sides of the APP interface are two disc rockers, which can be used to control the movement of the iron egg back and forth, left and right, or tilt the body up and down, left and right. The various action buttons of the iron egg are concentrated in the middle area of the interface, jumping, running, rolling, shaking hands, turning circles, etc.
The fastest speed of the iron egg can reach 3.2m/s, for safety reasons, the APP also added an emergency stop function, click the emergency stop button, no matter what the iron egg is doing will instantly lose power, obediently lie down.
It can be seen that the skills currently mastered by the iron egg are indeed more basic, xiaomi is also positioning it as the engineering exploration stage, and announced the open source co-creation plan, there are 3 Type-C interfaces and 1 HDMI interface on the back of the iron egg, leaving room for more function development and upgrading. I believe that with the magic reform of the big guy, iron eggs will have more new ways to play.
Mysterious Xiaomi robot project
So how was the Xiaomi Iron Egg born?
In fact, the Xiaomi Robot Project was established in October 2020, and the Iron Egg was jointly developed by the Xiaomi Mobile Phone Department, Xiao Ai Classmate, Xiaomi Camera Department, as well as Xiaomi Ecological Chain and Chaomi Technology (Ecological Chain Company). In addition to the technical blessing of Xiaomi's mobile phone products, it also uses the technology of vacuum cleaners and sweeping robots.
For example, the servo motors that allow the iron egg to complete the core of these complex actions, every 3 for a group, are installed in the "shoulder" and "crotch" of the iron egg, a total of 12, which control the pitch tilt of the iron egg's body and the movement of the thigh and calf joints, respectively. This motor is the same as the Mijia vacuum cleaner, and the maximum output power reaches 32Nm.
At the same time, 11 high-precision sensors are also used on the iron egg, including touch sensors, geomagnetic sensors, AI interactive cameras, binocular sensors, Intel RealSense D450 depth camera modules and so on. These sensors make up the iron egg's eye and perception system, allowing it to see and feel its surroundings like a real creature. Functions such as autonomous following and obstacle avoidance are based on these sensors.
To control the coordinated operation of so many motors and sensors, Xiaomi engineers have added a variety of algorithms to the iron egg, such as the autonomous following ability is derived from the derivation of face recognition technology, SLAM map building and navigation obstacle avoidance function are from the visual exploration technology extended by image technology, these skills are due to Xiaomi's accumulation in camera technology.
The iron egg's four feet and 12 servo motors are under the control of the Jeonji MR813 chip to ensure that it does not appear to turn or "pounce".
We are no strangers to quanzhi's chip. Quanzhi MR series chips have been widely used in sweeping robot products, including millet, stone, chasing, etc., the iron egg using MR813 is also a mature motion drive module for multiplexing and chasing.
Quanzhi MR813 chip can only be regarded as "cerebellum", the brain of the iron egg applies NVIDIA edge AI supercomputer Jetson Xavier NX platform, and its AI computing power reaches 21TOPS. When the environmental information obtained by the 11 sets of high-performance sensors is transmitted to the Jetson Xavier NX, the motion information is sent to the MR813 through the Gigabit ethernet port, and the MR813 performs the total control of the motor movement. It can be seen that the powerful brain computing power of the iron egg has not been fully exerted.
In addition, there is a controversy surrounding the Iron Egg, is the Iron Egg copying boston Dynamics' open source technology?
In fact, these domestic robot dogs do use open source technology, but they are not Boston Dynamics. Lei Jun is actually very frank in public, iron egg uses open source solutions such as MIT Mini Cheetah and ROS 2. The MIT Mini Cheetah is a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the world's first quadruped robot capable of completing a complete flip.
WITH Mini Cheetah
MIT-related labs have open sourced project code in the past few years, and by 2019, when all of Mini Cheetah's running code was open sourced, the project was all public. It is after this program is open source, the domestic two years set off an industry boom, Lei Jun generously admitted to the use of such open source solutions, there is no controversy.
It should be noted that Boston Dynamics has never open sourced so far, only a low-key open source software system, which is like everyone can develop an iOS app.
What is the intention of losing tens of millions of dollars
You know, Boston Dynamics' "net red" robot dog Spot is priced at nearly 500,000 yuan, and the price of the relatively famous four-legged robot dog in China is basically more than 15,000 yuan. Why is the asking price of the iron egg only 9999 yuan?
This is not because Xiaomi has any magic of cost control, according to industry insiders, according to the above research and development technology analysis, the cost of iron eggs may reach at least 50,000 yuan. This means that every time Xiaomi sells an iron egg, it will bear a loss of more than 40,000 yuan, and all 1,000 units will be sold, and the loss will be 40 million yuan.
So, what is Xiaomi's intention?
Obviously, at this stage, Xiaomi's launch of the iron egg is not to make money, just like the xiaomi official said, the iron egg is more of an exploration. For the entire industry, everyone's awareness of such products is still very limited, xiaomi is now out, with its influence, it is likely to promote the rapid popularization of the industry.
For Xiaomi, the robot dog technology involves motion control, machine vision, etc., and talents in related fields can be said to be very important to xiaomi's entire group. With the help of iron eggs, it can help Xiaomi recruit more talents. This 40 million yuan, whether from the perspective of brand marketing or attraction, looks like losing money, but it is actually quite "cost-effective".