Meet Xiaomi’s new humanoid robot, CyberOne – TechCrunch

Lengthy gone are the times when a client electronics firm might merely announce a telephone and name it a day. At this morning’s large launch occasion in Beijing, Xiaomi adopted up its foldable information by handing the stage over to CyberOne. The bipedal humanoid robotic joined Lei Jun onstage, greeting the CEO and handing him a long-stem flower.

At first look, the robotic isn’t precisely Atlas or Digit, by way of locomotion, however it’s nonetheless a promising demo and really a lot not an individual in a spandex go well with (not that anybody would try this). It’s the most recent signal of Xiaomi’s rising robotics ambitions, which started with vacuums and have since expanded to incorporate final yr’s Spot-esque CyberDog.

We’ve seen loads of client manufacturers flex some robotic muscle at occasions like this, together with Samsung and LG, so it’s robust to know the place CyberOne falls within the spectrum between critical pursuit and stage spectacle.

Lei Jun was fast to flex the corporate’s funding within the class, noting, “CyberOne’s AI and mechanical capabilities are all self-developed by Xiaomi Robotics Lab. We now have invested closely in R&D spanning numerous areas, together with software program, {hardware} and algorithms innovation.”

There’s an especially broad vary of claims right here, together with the power to learn human feelings. Xiaomi notes:

Humanoid robots depend on imaginative and prescient to course of their environment. Geared up with a self-developed Mi-Sense depth imaginative and prescient module and mixed with an AI interplay algorithm, CyberOne is able to perceiving 3D house, in addition to recognizing people, gestures, and expressions, permitting it to not solely see however to course of its atmosphere. As a way to talk with the world, CyberOne is provided with a self-developed MiAI atmosphere semantics recognition engine and a MiAI vocal emotion identification engine, enabling it to acknowledge 85 forms of environmental sounds and 45 classifications of human emotion. CyberOne is ready to detect happiness, and even consolation the consumer in occasions of unhappiness. All of those options are built-in into CyberOne’s processing items, that are paired with a curved OLED module to show real-time interactive info.

Equally broad are the promised real-world purposes, starting from manufacturing help to human companionship. There shall be loads of use for each of those function units sooner or later, however that’s a protracted stroll (so to talk) from in the present day’s demo. In the interim, it most likely makes essentially the most sense to view CyberOne as one thing of an analog to, say, Honda’s Asimo: a promising experiment that’s serves as model ambassador for a number of the work being achieved behind the scenes.