Some people on X are saying they're "just" cloning/copying "puppet" human movements.
I know very little about robotics, but given these appear totally free-standing, if that was the case (I personally don't think it is), wouldn't that imply they have the same centre of gravity and weight of limbs as humans? Surely they'd have to be able to balance themselves, and copying a human's movements "exactly" wouldn't work for their own motion otherwise?
I think when watching I saw one or two of the robots "judder" their feet a bit out of sync with others - this seems to imply they are capable of balancing their own motion a bit individually.
I've worked on much less expensive, much smaller humanoid robots.
These robots are certainly running through a scripted set of poses which has been extensively tested for the conditions (Humans would also be choreographed and have to hit certain marks at certain times). If you covered the stage in loose gravel or a thick carpet they'd all start falling over. The things the robots hold are almost certainly taped into their hands.
Despite that, this is a very impressive demo. Those robots are $40k+, they've got 20+ of them. And not a single one fell over. They're fast too - and there are a load of corners they could have cut, but they didn't.
The floor has two textures, it would have been easier without that. The humans right alongside them? Much less safety paperwork without them. The robot wearing trousers and a cape? Much easier without that. The fewer robots you have, the lower the chances on falls over landing their backflip. Lose the audience and record it in multiple takes. Hell, you could have human acrobats in robot costumes and it'd cost far less and be much easier.
So this demo is very much a costly signal of confidence.
Of course the robots have been pre-trained and the movements are scripted, and nobody is claiming otherwise. But there must be a lot of autonomous balancing taking place. At one point you can see the robots adjusting their feet slightly different although they are all in sync, and that catapult does not look like its movement is exactly the same every time. It is just super impressive.
Does anyone remember when Honda's Asimo robot clumsily fell down the stairs during a demonstration[1] and we thought we were safe from a robot invasion by just moving to the upper floor? That was about 20 years ago.
It’s not a 1:1 human motion capture to servo translation. There is some work done to fix Center of gravity like you said and issues with friction and momentum.
The hard part with “autonomy” is interpretation of the environment and feeding that back into some control loop to accomplish a goal in real time. That is why most of these demos are basically recordings of movements, like choreography.
They do use keyframes most likely captured from a human controller. you can see this after they do the backflip at :29s they land a bit differently and recover in slightly different ways but all end up in a static pose for a moment before moving on to next movement. The advancement here is the dynamics to go between those frames. Looking at last years performance you can see they pretty much go from frame a to b then stabilize then to c then stabilize. This is what makes this years look much more lifelike there seems to be some active stabilization going on during the movements. It also seems to let them chain movements that can take advantage of momentum much better rather than needing to be at rest between frames.
The impressive part here isn't the movement itself. You can easily train a model to perform a "procedural animation" that includes a full body control policy. The hard part is making it reliable enough to perform long sequences of movements and adapting to differences in robot placement. In other words, performing a flawless stage play is the hardest part.
Yes, the autonomy level of these robots was what I was yesterday emailing with my former colleagues we were wondering. Two months ago CNET & PC-Mag posted following video which suggests more about robots movements being assisted by humans. And it also shows Chinese have being edge of the development at that point.
There is another match viewable by pressing that "Robot plays ping ppng #robot" arrow.
How about that robot? Is it human assisted or not? Our opinions diverted, I'm quite sure it is assisted but my former colleague thinks it's got to be autonomous as it would be too difficult and slow to do that fast movements with remote control assisted robot.
It would be nice to hear opinions about that playing robot too if anyone could provide some insight in that.
edit: I think the serve waiting robot hand movement and after losing wiping left eye gesture as a disappointing a bit in my opinion gives up it's human. Or if not, why would a robot do such a human like gestures.
edit2: OK, good points, I see now. It's definitely a fake. Thanks to all who replied :)
1) Cool, but when are they actually going to drive my car for me?
2) Any semblance of American technological superiority is pure fantasy at this point. The only area where Americans are truly "advanced" is in selling overpriced SaaS products. There are dozens of Chinese startups with robots just like this—as seen at CES—yet Boston Dynamics is still treated like it’s some untouchable, DARPA-level tech.
3) A lot of this comes down to cost: you can either hire one American fresh grad or a Chinese PhD for the same price.
3) The second reason is cultural: Americans tend to buy solutions, while the Chinese prefer to build them. Even SMEs in China maintain internal dev teams to build custom software for the business, as opposed to paying Salesforce for what is essentially a glorified Excel sheet with sprinkles of automation.
4) America is facing its own innovator's dilemma. The country is currently being run by MBAs and salespeople focused on extracting every last dollar from the consumer instead of providing real value or innovating. Perhaps we're one step beyond the innovators dilemma. The innovators are dead and we are in the corporate greed stage.
5) Americans are completely oblivious to how advanced China has become because of the propaganda they're fed. My personal "aha" moment was when Chinese EVs hit my local market and completely obliterated legacy automakers on both features and price. The American "free" (lol) market is being guarded by politicians but that won't work for long.
#4 is the biggest problem, by an overwhelmingly wide margin. Solve that and everything else fixes itself more or less instantly. Everything is now about money and extracting every single penny possible, instead of about actually achieving things. Even most 'entrepreneurs' are now just starting businesses primarily with the goal of selling them. Everything is broken, because of the pursuit of money became the goal, further compounding by everything being run by people who have no skills except the pursuit of money.
Money should be a means to achieve a thing, not the goal in and of itself. I think the most visible decline came with the increasingly overt goal to charge rent on friggin everything. That's simply not a sustainable or realistic economic model for society and consequently even if it might maximize corporate income in the short to mid-term, in the longterm it's equally catastrophic for them as well.
It’s clear to me that the smartest thing China ever did was to limit speculation in the markets. So many human capital in America is wasted pumping up valuations instead of actually building stuff
Every Jane Street hire could be building robots, but instead, they’re trading options and crypto and heck, even market making for prediction markets now
On one hand Boston Dynamics showed similar skill robot well before this demo, only without coreography, which is were most of the wow effect comes from here.
Things is american research is financed by outcome potential not for grandstanding, and free standing robot that can only do recorded coreography aren't that useful outside factory floors, and factory floors can use ceiling rails or wheels to better effect.
So yeah video is suler cool, but there isn't much to it beyond that to read in terms of capabilities. You seem just to be projecting what the truth you want to be on top of a funny dance.
I visited China in November, the amount of different brands of electric vehicles is staggering. And even small hotels had robots delivering packages or food to the rooms.
What impressed me the most is the amount of EVs on the streets.
Also hardwares availability. I saw some X threads that mentioned how US/EU robotics labs/companies need week to procure new hardwares, Chinese ones need days at most. Cant iterate quickly with that constraint.
Imagine you need weeks to start a new software module development and to procure cloud instances.
As European faced with similar pain points, I would assert it was having those MBAs offshoring everything with a colonial attittude, as if the nations on the received end would only take orders from their masters and not learn to master the technology themselves.
After a while, naturally the locals would buy the white label products that are anyway the same as the branded ones, many times produced on the same factory lines.
My father used to say, every company goes downhill when management takes over, meaning those straight out management schools without any actual business experience on what the company does, and he was kind of right, that is how we hand landed in late stage capitalism and entshitification, in the middle of geopolitics turn over.
These robots might not drive the car for us, but certainly will become part of some police containment unit, regardless if they are remote controlled or AI driven.
I was born in 1989. The most impressive sudden technological advance I have experienced have been LLMs. This video is a good candidate for second place. I am mindblown... That they even dare having children dance with them. The trust they must place. An acquantance bought a chess board with a robot arm, and it accidentally broke his finger because he picked up a piece that the robot arm wanted to pick up. China isn't just a few hours in the future, more like decades it feels like.
You were born in 1989 and don't consider the internet the most impressive sudden technological advantage you have lived through? Wireless communication? Jesus.
Boston dynamics is far behind plus the robots are so cheap , even their dog is cheaper than BD. I dont think their humanoid can even catch up to this price. I am sure US Army and for the chinese counterpart Chinese army will be their biggest customers. But i wonder how will this workout in situations like Plane hijack, fire fighting and other such places where human lives cant be risked to save more human lives. (Please Dont downvote because your american patriotism is poked try replying.)
What is the most impressive is the robustness. Of course they are following a captured human routine, but they are facing so many disturbances from which they need to recover and keep following the desired trajectories, while under multiple constraints (movement ranges, not losing balance, etc).
You can see on the backflips that all robots landed quite differently, some with both knees on the ground, some with one, some with none. Yet all recovered gracefully and moved on to the next step of the choreography.
It is genuinely impressive, and scary.
Meanwhile in the west we are bickering like 10year olds.
Oh god the bickering. For self driving cars, lidar vs cameras is totally missing the point. Waymo can drive with cameras only. The AGI question is what decisions does it make when things go wrong.
one interesting observation is that none of those companies are located in Shenzhen, which arguably has the best supply chain for all electronics stuff. I guess those trillions $ spent on infrastructure paid off - Shenzhen didn't suck all talents into its proximity, it becomes an enabler for industries across the country.
Agibot is not in Shenzhen?
I think what happened is that other major cities/provinces like Hangzhou, Suzhou, Shanghai or Hefei started bankrolling talents and enterprises so they too can have major high tech enterprises in their town
We are definitely on an exponential in term of capabilities of humanoid robots.
We are probably only years away from having a robot in the house, in construction of robots. Automating anything that a human can do is best done in a human sized robot.
But.
None of these are actually useful right now. I don't want something with the arm strength of a forklift taking care of my parents or kids. The demand for humanoid robots right now is like lift a fridge from a delivery truck to a house (aka more mobile forklift) or walk through toxic sewage to pull crates out. Super useful but basically just mobile cranes, which is a small market. China seems to be making the mistake of pushing a tech demo as a consumer product (we've all been on those projects...) which can make people hate the tech.
Build something people want, don't mandate what they want. We're like 3-4 generations from amazing, useful robots. I'll be scared when these things are minding a bunch of dogs on stage.
> I don't want something with the arm strength of a forklift taking care of my parents or kids.
A risk I never hear discussed is falling over and injuring children. Even the petite Unitree models are like a 70kg piece of furniture. Each year thousands get injured because of furniture falling over. I'd buy one immediately, but if I had kids or pets, I would wait for safety data on falls.
> I don't want something with the arm strength of a forklift taking care of my parents or kids.
Robots in such an environment are designed with the appropriate affordances so that they cannot use too much force... but the concern about weight I suppose is quite salient.
Last time I had to implement a typed programming language, it was for short programs only. So for typing I just converted the program into a large set of constraints and throw z4 at it, asking to optimize for smallest possible types. If z4 could find types for every expressions in less than a few seconds then it was well typed.
You had to use a few trick for larger programs, but basically it managed to type any real programs and I never encountered an ambihuous case that caused a problem in practice. In case of failure, the small set of unsatisfiable constraints was easy to translate into nice error messages. This also allows for typing rules that are easy to state and can accomodate operators that adapts nicely to their environment.
I would understand if this approach would be frowned upon, but I still wonder if any serious language ever used this approach?
What really stood out was that when they portrayed different important jobs it was all done by men and women were in the background as decoration/onlookers in awe. Very strange development.
I would love this if it wasn’t clear that due to the configuration of our economic system this technology will be used against humanity and in favor of the demons who rule the planet.
there is reason why in those 5 minutes you see them together in same shot with audience only 2 times and only for few seconds
there is reason why most of the shots are not wide angle showing whole scene, seems they learned their lesson from last year where you could easily see on the edges all the failures
this was heavily edited and repeated, I mean is it really surprising considering all CGI you see during whole gala? I watched whole 5 hours (though skimmed through a lot), they just can't make show same as seen by real people on the site, what you see in TV is very different from what audience has seen
edit: the whole gala show is recording, it would be impossible to organize such event across many cities with so many performances live, olympics opening ceremony is walk in the park compared to this
While I don't know whether this was indeed broadcast live, at least this recording is missing a section since as the YT comments point out at 1:25 the staffs appear out of nowhere.
Yeah, I noticed the heavy editing of the gala this year too and it was very disappointing. Even in tons of performances / dances where they really shouldn't have needed to there were obvious cinematic shots were not 'live' from the same recording. While for the robots I can imagine the pressure might have lead to editing a few takes, it really took away from the regular dancing performances and made it feel a bit more like watching a heavily edited music video.
I'm not so sure what this question means... are you asking if China has AGI right now? I'm quite sure all similar performances done by humans are all staged.
Based on where other companies are right now, it's probably a pre programmed routine, but the robots autonomously balance themselves. Anything beyond that would be quite a large leap, and I think Unitree would've gloated about it way more outside of the gala. The robots' speed and consistency are still impressive, though.
kasperni|11 days ago
dachris|11 days ago
The Spot dog (which inspired the Black Mirror "Metalhead" episode) in 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng
Atlas doing backflips in 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FByY3tSx2Ak
So 5 years of progress within a year.
pixelesque|11 days ago
I know very little about robotics, but given these appear totally free-standing, if that was the case (I personally don't think it is), wouldn't that imply they have the same centre of gravity and weight of limbs as humans? Surely they'd have to be able to balance themselves, and copying a human's movements "exactly" wouldn't work for their own motion otherwise?
I think when watching I saw one or two of the robots "judder" their feet a bit out of sync with others - this seems to imply they are capable of balancing their own motion a bit individually.
michaelt|11 days ago
These robots are certainly running through a scripted set of poses which has been extensively tested for the conditions (Humans would also be choreographed and have to hit certain marks at certain times). If you covered the stage in loose gravel or a thick carpet they'd all start falling over. The things the robots hold are almost certainly taped into their hands.
Despite that, this is a very impressive demo. Those robots are $40k+, they've got 20+ of them. And not a single one fell over. They're fast too - and there are a load of corners they could have cut, but they didn't.
The floor has two textures, it would have been easier without that. The humans right alongside them? Much less safety paperwork without them. The robot wearing trousers and a cape? Much easier without that. The fewer robots you have, the lower the chances on falls over landing their backflip. Lose the audience and record it in multiple takes. Hell, you could have human acrobats in robot costumes and it'd cost far less and be much easier.
So this demo is very much a costly signal of confidence.
jansan|11 days ago
Does anyone remember when Honda's Asimo robot clumsily fell down the stairs during a demonstration[1] and we thought we were safe from a robot invasion by just moving to the upper floor? That was about 20 years ago.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mx6paHrnIE
wasmainiac|11 days ago
The hard part with “autonomy” is interpretation of the environment and feeding that back into some control loop to accomplish a goal in real time. That is why most of these demos are basically recordings of movements, like choreography.
clifdweller|10 days ago
tw1984|11 days ago
check this 4 months old video below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPSLMX_V38E
I'd willing to bet that it is already close to impossible to get the robot lose its balance without some significant external forces.
simonjgreen|11 days ago
imtringued|11 days ago
noxin|11 days ago
holoduke|11 days ago
unknown|11 days ago
[deleted]
mesrik|11 days ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXTibM33SDg
However, then another short video bit alike popped up and is puzzling too.
Apparently Unitree robot is playing pingpong match like a pro. Sorry about german announcer, I couldn't find with english.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BgD1ukTyNnw
There is another match viewable by pressing that "Robot plays ping ppng #robot" arrow.
How about that robot? Is it human assisted or not? Our opinions diverted, I'm quite sure it is assisted but my former colleague thinks it's got to be autonomous as it would be too difficult and slow to do that fast movements with remote control assisted robot.
It would be nice to hear opinions about that playing robot too if anyone could provide some insight in that.
edit: I think the serve waiting robot hand movement and after losing wiping left eye gesture as a disappointing a bit in my opinion gives up it's human. Or if not, why would a robot do such a human like gestures.
edit2: OK, good points, I see now. It's definitely a fake. Thanks to all who replied :)
rolymath|11 days ago
2) Any semblance of American technological superiority is pure fantasy at this point. The only area where Americans are truly "advanced" is in selling overpriced SaaS products. There are dozens of Chinese startups with robots just like this—as seen at CES—yet Boston Dynamics is still treated like it’s some untouchable, DARPA-level tech.
3) A lot of this comes down to cost: you can either hire one American fresh grad or a Chinese PhD for the same price.
3) The second reason is cultural: Americans tend to buy solutions, while the Chinese prefer to build them. Even SMEs in China maintain internal dev teams to build custom software for the business, as opposed to paying Salesforce for what is essentially a glorified Excel sheet with sprinkles of automation.
4) America is facing its own innovator's dilemma. The country is currently being run by MBAs and salespeople focused on extracting every last dollar from the consumer instead of providing real value or innovating. Perhaps we're one step beyond the innovators dilemma. The innovators are dead and we are in the corporate greed stage.
5) Americans are completely oblivious to how advanced China has become because of the propaganda they're fed. My personal "aha" moment was when Chinese EVs hit my local market and completely obliterated legacy automakers on both features and price. The American "free" (lol) market is being guarded by politicians but that won't work for long.
somenameforme|11 days ago
Money should be a means to achieve a thing, not the goal in and of itself. I think the most visible decline came with the increasingly overt goal to charge rent on friggin everything. That's simply not a sustainable or realistic economic model for society and consequently even if it might maximize corporate income in the short to mid-term, in the longterm it's equally catastrophic for them as well.
spaceman_2020|11 days ago
Every Jane Street hire could be building robots, but instead, they’re trading options and crypto and heck, even market making for prediction markets now
avereveard|11 days ago
On one hand Boston Dynamics showed similar skill robot well before this demo, only without coreography, which is were most of the wow effect comes from here.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UNorxwlZlFk
Heck check were they were 5 years ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw&pp=0gcJCUABo7VqN5t...
Things is american research is financed by outcome potential not for grandstanding, and free standing robot that can only do recorded coreography aren't that useful outside factory floors, and factory floors can use ceiling rails or wheels to better effect.
So yeah video is suler cool, but there isn't much to it beyond that to read in terms of capabilities. You seem just to be projecting what the truth you want to be on top of a funny dance.
ErneX|11 days ago
What impressed me the most is the amount of EVs on the streets.
eunos|11 days ago
Imagine you need weeks to start a new software module development and to procure cloud instances.
pjmlp|11 days ago
After a while, naturally the locals would buy the white label products that are anyway the same as the branded ones, many times produced on the same factory lines.
My father used to say, every company goes downhill when management takes over, meaning those straight out management schools without any actual business experience on what the company does, and he was kind of right, that is how we hand landed in late stage capitalism and entshitification, in the middle of geopolitics turn over.
These robots might not drive the car for us, but certainly will become part of some police containment unit, regardless if they are remote controlled or AI driven.
kaon_2|11 days ago
thefz|10 days ago
somenameforme|11 days ago
elil17|11 days ago
They are very different robots with very different goals, so it should be no surprise that the G1 appears much more agile.
nialv7|10 days ago
[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UNorxwlZlFk
pankajdoharey|11 days ago
4gotunameagain|11 days ago
You can see on the backflips that all robots landed quite differently, some with both knees on the ground, some with one, some with none. Yet all recovered gracefully and moved on to the next step of the choreography.
It is genuinely impressive, and scary.
Meanwhile in the west we are bickering like 10year olds.
fragmede|11 days ago
tw1984|11 days ago
Unitree's army of robots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4IOJH9Akhg
Robotera sword dancing robots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ti9Mi8rbIQ
AGIbot's flying kicks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXnXdh6IEkA
LimX's Tron2 robot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut3QFPr7hyo
one interesting observation is that none of those companies are located in Shenzhen, which arguably has the best supply chain for all electronics stuff. I guess those trillions $ spent on infrastructure paid off - Shenzhen didn't suck all talents into its proximity, it becomes an enabler for industries across the country.
eunos|11 days ago
verdverm|11 days ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hIqs3TBb5g
k_kelly|11 days ago
We are definitely on an exponential in term of capabilities of humanoid robots. We are probably only years away from having a robot in the house, in construction of robots. Automating anything that a human can do is best done in a human sized robot.
But.
None of these are actually useful right now. I don't want something with the arm strength of a forklift taking care of my parents or kids. The demand for humanoid robots right now is like lift a fridge from a delivery truck to a house (aka more mobile forklift) or walk through toxic sewage to pull crates out. Super useful but basically just mobile cranes, which is a small market. China seems to be making the mistake of pushing a tech demo as a consumer product (we've all been on those projects...) which can make people hate the tech.
Build something people want, don't mandate what they want. We're like 3-4 generations from amazing, useful robots. I'll be scared when these things are minding a bunch of dogs on stage.
ponector|11 days ago
They could be really useful: without hesitation such humanoid could bring pack of explosives to the opposed treeline.
energy123|11 days ago
A risk I never hear discussed is falling over and injuring children. Even the petite Unitree models are like a 70kg piece of furniture. Each year thousands get injured because of furniture falling over. I'd buy one immediately, but if I had kids or pets, I would wait for safety data on falls.
jhanschoo|10 days ago
Robots in such an environment are designed with the appropriate affordances so that they cannot use too much force... but the concern about weight I suppose is quite salient.
rixed|11 days ago
You had to use a few trick for larger programs, but basically it managed to type any real programs and I never encountered an ambihuous case that caused a problem in practice. In case of failure, the small set of unsatisfiable constraints was easy to translate into nice error messages. This also allows for typing rules that are easy to state and can accomodate operators that adapts nicely to their environment.
I would understand if this approach would be frowned upon, but I still wonder if any serious language ever used this approach?
RobertoG|11 days ago
gravifer|11 days ago
faeyanpiraat|11 days ago
thenthenthen|11 days ago
Gud|11 days ago
ciconia|11 days ago
wazoox|11 days ago
Markoff|11 days ago
there is reason why most of the shots are not wide angle showing whole scene, seems they learned their lesson from last year where you could easily see on the edges all the failures
this was heavily edited and repeated, I mean is it really surprising considering all CGI you see during whole gala? I watched whole 5 hours (though skimmed through a lot), they just can't make show same as seen by real people on the site, what you see in TV is very different from what audience has seen
edit: the whole gala show is recording, it would be impossible to organize such event across many cities with so many performances live, olympics opening ceremony is walk in the park compared to this
seekdeep|10 days ago
Reason: otherwise, you will be asking what happens when the shot is switched between the stage and the audience.
krackers|11 days ago
While I don't know whether this was indeed broadcast live, at least this recording is missing a section since as the YT comments point out at 1:25 the staffs appear out of nowhere.
ddxv|11 days ago
unknown|11 days ago
[deleted]
expedition32|10 days ago
Now the nice thing about demographics is that it's eminently predictable. IMO this is why China is going all in on robotics.
seekdeep|10 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072626
slimebot80|11 days ago
No less impressive, but is it likely each robot autonomously learned a routine? Or just got programmed for a very exact act?
raincole|11 days ago
sheept|11 days ago
lukan|11 days ago
merpkz|11 days ago
verdverm|11 days ago
eisfresser|11 days ago
ekjhgkejhgk|10 days ago
senectus1|11 days ago
metanonsense|11 days ago
verdverm|11 days ago
dvh|11 days ago
lifestyleguru|11 days ago
andrewstuart|11 days ago