Behind Musk's 'Optimus Prime', humanoid robots are opening new commercial entrances
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Musk's "Optimus Prime" humanoid robot is about to debut. According to Tesla's official announcement, Tesla 2022 AI Day will be held on October 1 (September 30, 2022 North American time) in Palo Alto, California .
Since the first "Transformers" came out, many images in the film have been sought after by many fans, and as a result, different service products have been derived. For example, Beijing Universal Studios has created robots such as Megatron and Optimus Prime. . However, unlike robots such as Megatron and Optimus Prime in Universal Studios Beijing, Musk's "Optimus Prime" is not a robot played by a real person, but a real humanoid robot based on artificial intelligence technology.
From Tesla, Dyson to Xiaomi, etc., with more and more big technology companies entering the humanoid robot, human beings may soon usher in the era of coexistence with humanoid robots.
Musk's "Optimus Prime"
As early as the last century, the world has already had the exploration and birth of humanoid robots. In 1927, the Westinghouse Company of the United States produced the world's first humanoid robot, but this robot could not walk, and could only lift the receiver to answer the phone. However, it wasn't until 1937 that Westinghouse developed a humanoid robot capable of performing 26 different daily activities.
After research by Swedish inventors, NASA, Japan's Waseda University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Honda, British Engineered Arts, American Agile Robotics, and domestic UBTECH, humanoid robots have begun to walk, voice, and face. Recognize, carry items, dance, run, with more and more perfect functions. At the same time, humanoid robots are getting closer and closer to the human facial features. They can simulate complex body movements and postures, perform breathing and sweating, and maintain the temperature of human skin and epidermis. The expressions they create are more realistic.
Especially today, the humanoid robot, which has experienced decades of development, is moving towards more and more perfection, anthropomorphism and intelligence. On Tesla Artificial Intelligence Day in August last year, Musk announced to the world that Tesla was going to “create people”. Now, on the new Tesla AI Day on October 1, the Tesla robot will be officially unveiled.
According to the preview, the Tesla robot has a slender figure, a height of about 172cm, a weight of only 56.6kg, and its skin is smoother than that of a human. But its head is equipped with a display screen that can display information, and it is also equipped with 8 cameras as visual sensors. In order to better control the limbs and torso, Optimus Prime is equipped with 40 electromechanical actuators, and the legs contain force-sensing devices, which can move at a speed of 8 km/h and can carry 20 kg of objects.
And, vision and brain are key systems for humanoid robots. For this, the Tesla robot will be based on Tesla's FSD (Fully Autonomous Driving) computer modules and solutions, with eight Autopilot cameras on the face, with a maximum monitoring distance of 250 meters; the "brain" uses a special Sla's supercomputer system, Dojo, conducts neural network training through AI big data. Its core is the "D1" chip with extremely powerful computing power and ultra-high bandwidth. 25 chips form a training unit, and the computing power can reach 9 trillion. Second-rate.
And according to what Musk has said before, the unit price of Optimus Prime will not be ridiculously high. In fact, in an interview in April this year, Musk already revealed that Tesla robots are expected to sell for $25,000 (about 170,000 yuan), which may be much cheaper than Tesla cars .
According to the forecast of relevant agencies, Optimus Prime will be completed in 2022 and the first version will be put into operation in 2023. Compared with Optimus Prime, the domestic Xiaomi humanoid robot CyberOne has been launched earlier on August 11 this year. However, the Chinese name of CyberOne - Tie Da is not so pleasant.
Compared with Optimus Prime, CyberOne is mainly used in various life service scenarios, with a height of 1.77 meters and a weight of 52 kg. It can recognize 85 kinds of ambient sounds and 45 kinds of human emotions in 6 categories, but CyberOne has only 21 degrees of freedom. The walking speed is 3.6km per hour, but the cost has reached 600,000-700,000 yuan, and mass production has not yet been achieved. It can be said that Xiaomi's big iron-CyberOne still has a lot of room for improvement in terms of joint freedom, control system, walking speed, etc. In addition to Xiaomi, major Internet manufacturers have also invested in the field of robotics, such as Baidu's robot platform ABC Robot, Alibaba, and Huawei.
In addition to Tesla, Dyson, which "out of the circle" with home appliances, has also entered the field of humanoid robots. What has been released is a robotic arm that can pick up bleach and pick up plates. Dyson's vision is to have humanoid robots that can do housework within the next 10 years. With the experience and technology accumulated in the home service field of products such as sweeping robots, hair dryers and vacuum cleaners, Dyson plans to use its own superior technology to create a home nanny humanoid robot.
new commercial entrance
The reason why tech giants love humanoid robots is fundamentally because of the unquestionable future trend shown by humanoid robots.
At present, robots can be roughly divided into three categories: industrial robots, service robots, and special robots. Among them, industrial robots refer to multi-joint manipulators or multi-degree-of-freedom robots oriented to the industrial field. In the process of industrial production and processing, automatic control is used to replace humans to perform certain monotonous, frequent and repetitive long-term operations; service robots refer to unstructured environments. A variety of high-tech integrated advanced robots that provide necessary services for humans; special robots refer to robots that replace humans in high-risk environments and special working conditions.
But whether it is for industrial robots or service robots, robots with humanoid shape are of great significance to the development of the robot industry.
In terms of industrial robots, at present, the development of global robots has been more than half a century, but according to IFR data, the number of industrial robots in the world in 2019 is only 2.72 million units. The per capita possession of industrial robots is only 3.63 units per 10,000 people. In 2019, affected by the escalation of global trade frictions, the number of new installations of industrial robots declined. According to IFR estimates, it may not return to pre-epidemic levels until 2022-2023.
Looking back at the development history of the past few decades, the slow development of industrial robots is not only affected by the macro economy, but also related to their primary intelligence level and difficult to migrate application environment. Traditional industrial robots mainly solve the efficiency problem of traditional manufacturing, and complete repetitive tasks in a static, structured, and deterministic unmanned environment. Their work is characterized by relative isolation in space, non-contact with people, pre-programming or teaching reproduction Control, requires external security.
With the upgrading and transformation of the manufacturing industry itself, small batches, multiple varieties, short cycles, and individualization will become the distinctive features of emerging manufacturing industries. Therefore, the trend of industrial robots will also be able to integrate into human production and living environments and complement human advantages. , cooperate and help each other, and then become a human assistant robot with variable operation ability. Robots will ultimately need to work in the real world that humans are in. That said, developing a humanoid robot appears to be more cost-effective than modifying the entire environment.
After all, the environment of modern society is designed for human beings themselves, such as the width of corridors, the height of stairs, the position of handrails and the position of doorknobs, and countless other things must be suitable for human size and movement, which are in the process of social construction. Sunk costs. Therefore, when the robot has the shape of a human and can move like a human, there is no need to change the human environment for the robot.
In addition, humanoid robots are more acceptable to people than other service robots. According to the "uncanny valley effect", before the fidelity of the medium level, whether it is a static simulation or a dynamic simulation, people's favorability for it increases with the increase of fidelity. That is, simulations with an upper-middle level are the most popular and the ones that win the audience the most.
In the rising part of the first curve of the "uncanny valley theory", humans and humanoid robots are more likely to have emotional communication. Humanoid robots imitate human beings in appearance and behavior design, with hands, feet, head and torso, etc., which are easy to gain human favor, closeness and emotional identity. And the closer they are to humans, the higher the level of acceptance and recognition, having a human appearance is a very important factor in the fact that robots may become human companions and bring people fun.
It can be said that humanoid robots are expected to become another entry after mobile phones and cars, with huge commercial value. After all, although the mobile phone entrance integrates many functions such as calls, maps, work, and entertainment, it is the general entrance for each function. However, compared with mobile phones, humanoid robots have more comprehensive functions, more diverse and more diverse interaction scenarios with people, and are expected to become new commercial entrances .
What other unsolved problems are there?
However, there are still many obstacles to face before humanoid robots can actually arrive.
From the perspective of hardware alone, humanoid robots still have a long way to go, because a very important issue involved in humanoid robots at the hardware level is flexibility .
On the one hand, the robot is assembled from mechanical parts, and on the other hand, these mechanical parts are different from the human body's skeleton and neural control system. In order to make the humanoid robot achieve human-like flexibility. Or at least make a humanoid robot look like a person, then to achieve such an effect, there is still a long way to go at the hardware level.
In addition, in terms of stability, humanoid robots also require robot companies to set multi-level stability strategies, such as gait cycle adjustment, foot contact surface adjustment, fall and climb mechanism and other strategies; in terms of natural action, Humanoid robots need to explore high-dimensional actions through dynamic models; in terms of action diversity, it is necessary to promote humanoid robots to explore more difficult actions by imitating human actions or referring to the relevant evidence of human actions.
In addition, humanoid robots need more time at the level of AI algorithms and deep learning. At least from the current level of artificial intelligence technology, it will take more time for robots to reach the human-like level . Because the current AI can only do some statistics and analysis of data to a large extent, including some regular reading and dictation work, it is not logical and thinking, and it is even more in control of the entire hardware body. start-up stage. Because the neural control system of the human body is a very wonderful system, which is formed by human beings trained for tens of thousands of years. Obviously, the current humanoid robot is not only in the aspect of pure AI thinking, but also in the aspect of coordinated control with the robot hardware. Just in its infancy.
Finally, humanoid robots are full of huge profit margins, otherwise it would be impossible to attract so many excellent manufacturers and investors . At present, one of the limiting conditions of humanoid robots is the development of general AI technology, and the other is to return to cost. When will the cost of a humanoid robot get close to the price of a car? This determines whether it can actually enter the family.
At present, the cost of most well-known humanoid robot products is more than 1 million yuan. In the cost map of humanoid robots, the most expensive is the steering gear, including motor reducer, encoder, motor structure, etc., accounting for 1/3~1/2 of the cost; the other part is various electronic sensors and computing power boards , accounting for nearly 1/4~1/3; in addition, there are structural parts of the whole machine. However, with mass production, the cost of the humanoid robot's overall structural parts and steering gear will be greatly reduced, and the structural parts will need to be upgraded by materials and processing technology.
Finally, humanoid robots need to face controversial ethical issues when they enter the human world. Undoubtedly, it is the yearning for the development of human science and technology to let humanoid robots do repetitive, monotonous and dangerous work for humans. According to McKinsey's report, by 2030, nearly 400 million jobs worldwide will be replaced by automated robots. As for where to go for the people who have been replaced, they may also have to be vaccinated in advance and take preventive and resettlement measures.
However, no matter what the current technology is and what stage it is in, what is certain now is that the era in which humanoid robots will live with us humans may be waiting for us not far away.