Impressive … and scary. Why is it that this company is moving so fast when others like Boston Dynamics don’t seem to have made much progress?
Impressive … and scary. Why is it that this company is moving so fast when others like Boston Dynamics don’t seem to have made much progress?
Chinese work ethic driven by overproduction of STEM majors leading to 25% youth unemployment...also they probably stole a lot of the fundamental stuff that was super hard to produce but easy to copy and build on top of.
On the other side: Years of VC focusing on the next great app to make you some cooked eggs instead of investing in companies operating in the physical world.
Their earlier robots (A1, Go 1) have a lot of lineage from Ben Kats' (from MIT) Mini Cheetah project, even down to the shape of the communication protocols used for motor control. I've not had the chance to closely inspect their newer robots, so I can't tell you what's their secret sauce, but I suspect it has as much to do with RL-based control and software as it does with hardware improvements.
I often hear about "muh china stealing", two questions come to mind:
1. how could they steal something that western companies dont even have yet?
2. for more fundamental stuff, western companies did transfer knowledge themselves by moving factories to China, in exchange for decades of access to China market and exorbitant profits they earned. Where exactly is "supposed stealing" in unitree ?
There's no use for these robots(even militarily). It's very high tech, but that's it.
Veho[1] is experimenting[2] with similar kinds of robots for package delivery.
[1] https://www.shipveho.com/rivr
[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d6jU_4XjkTU
You are assuming this thing is real and not just a web page.
Not that you have much reason to believe a stranger on the internet, but I have seen this in person.
Not doing acrobatics like the marketing video of course, just doing mundane things like going from point A to point B.
Unitree is a huge well known company. You think they'd fake this?
The demo images look AI generated, so I can understand the impression that this is vaporware. The demo videos look very real to me however.
is using a prototype firmware or hardware platform faking it when you're showing exclusive prototype capabilities and trying to pass them off as reproducible by the production unit?
unitree has done this consistently.
What does unitree G1 do as a demo that it can't do once you bought one?
they're a chinese company and this is a VC funded western company; so that's half the answer.
The other half is yes, of course, any company will fake it till they make it.
But Unitree is definitely making robots.