According to a brief demo last week, the CyberOne does show us the current state of robot development for a non-specialized company like Xiaomi and offers valuable context as to what we might expect from Tesla’s Optimus robot, due to be unveiled as a prototype later this year on September 30th.
As stated in Xiaomi’s official specs, the CyberOne weighs 52kg and stands 177cm tall. It has a top speed of 3.6km/h and comes with a pair of mitten-like hands which can open and close but seem less capable of handling more agile movement.
With a machine vision system for navigation that can do depth-sensing at distances of up to eight meters, Xiaomi said it can also “perceive” human emotion, presumably by using an AI system to recognize facial expressions.
With no surprising capabilities, outclassed by bipedal creations from Boston Dynamics mobility wise , and unimpressive in terms of perception and processing capabilities, why build it in the first place?
At the IEEE Spectrum, robot reporter Evan Ackerman points out that Xiaomi is actually being quite honest about CyberOne’s mission. CyberOne will be a marketing tool and a platform for broader R&D efforts.
Tesla founder Elon Musk on the other hand, has promised to build a robot butler. Musk said the machine would be able to follow complex human commands for instance “please go to a store and get me the following groceries.” He has recently described the future Tesla Optimus as a “general-purpose humanoid robot” that will “replace people in repetitive, boring, and dangerous tasks.”
Tesla says the purpose of creating a robot is to do some basic general tasks in its factories, lessening the workload on its employees and also to protect the company from potential future worker shortages.
In January, Elon Musk said that Tesla is prioritizing product development of the Optimus humanoid robot in 2022 over other products, targeting to start the production of the robot in 2023 which is rather ambitious.
Xiaomi’s CyberOne provides a much more realistic picture of what to expect when it comes to building a bot. Tesla will build and unveil a prototype humanoid prototype bot at the end of September. Like Xiaomi’s CyberOne, Tesla’s humanoid bot will be able to walk and talk in prearranged demos, and most likely able to display some more advanced hand movement or lifting capabilities, for example Agility Robotics’ Digit bot, which is bipedal and can lift up to 18 kilograms. Making a robot for both marketing and research purposes fun and productive, as the CyberOne shows.
