The warranty on the base model is only 8 months, and for the higher end model only a year. This is not good!
Even worse, and likely illegal(!), the warranty has terms that are likely against FTC guidelines, like voiding the warranty if you disassemble the robot. As far as I know, these type of terms are not valid. They also include terms saying your warranty is void if third party service or parts are used - these are also not valid under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.
> The warranty on the base model is only 8 months, and for the higher end model only a year. This is not good!
They are also almost impossible to self-repair & service beyond changing motors & batteries. And spare parts are not sold, at least not through the web store: https://shop.unitree.com/collections/accessories
It could change in the future, but for now, it's best to think of Unitree products as very advanced toys & prototypes.
It's a true wonder that we even have a $16K humanoid robot on the market. :)
We are really in the early days. And this $16K humanoid robot is by far (like, 5x-10x) cheaper than other alternatives on the market. I might even buy one, despite it not being repairable or serviceable.
They are probably just selling this B2B in which case most of which you are quoting doesn’t apply.
Also I’m not familiar with USA laws in particular, but often domestic consumer protection laws surrounding warranties etc do not apply to overseas sellers.
AliExpress also offers shipping services that can deliver to EU but still, VAT and duty is your responsibility and thus they are not selling directly, you are self importing.
Generally, offering a shipping service that accepts an address in EU doesn't mean anything. Practically any shipping service can arrange delivery anywhere in the world today, even national posts. When I buy something on the internet (and I do this very frequently), the seller uses their local national post and my national post delivers it - but it goes through the international arrivals center where I have to pay duty and VAT.
They would have to incorporate a local branch in EU, pay import duty and take VAT from you for it to be considered a local sale according to EU consumer laws. You can check whether that's the case in Terms of Services - it should be clear who is the seller from that. If it's not an address in EU, you are self importing.
Even then, EU consumer protection mostly doesn't apply. They are shipping to EU countries, but selling from China.
If the sale transaction is with the Chinese entity, and the goods are then shipped to the EU, EU protections won't apply (will fall under Chinese consumer protection laws instead).
>Even worse, and likely illegal(!), the warranty has terms that are likely against FTC guidelines, like voiding the warranty if you disassemble the robot. As far as I know, these type of terms are not valid.
Yea that's the joke. They can just claim a tiny scratch is why the robot is broken and void the warranty that way. Standard practice these days.
I'm looking forward to the mass production of next-gen robotics platforms and components; hopefully these companies will get a good product improvement feedback loop going like other manufactured goods (cars, batteries, screens, electronics, etc). Once that gets going and they can sell reliable actuators, control systems, and chassis components on the mass market for cheap, then robotics is going to get crazy.
Hopefully we get some open source designs as well, and open collaboration in the engineering community.
And hopefully humanoid robots don't turn out like most "smart" devices, where all the guts are closed-source binary blobs the user has no control over. (I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that). Not to mention the consequences of having your humanoid robot hacked remotely could be quite horrific...
We will probably get as much collaboration as the car industry does with some basic components and standards. But perhaps big differences in the major hardware (hands, chassis). The most valuable part, the AI models, will certainly be closed.
With that said, it is hard to imagine the economics of humanoid robots. The trend seems to favor automation in controlled environments for certain products. Then the displaced factory workers flood remaining jobs driving down labor costs and shutting down any prospect of a humanoid machine.
Yes, the economics of such a device are the interesting part.
The point where it all changes is when the humanoid robot can repair itself / make a copy of itself.
That's a physical compiler that can bootstrap itself.
That's a genie that lets you wish for more wishes.
What that does to the economy is anybody's guess.
When we'll make one and when the average joe will be able to get their hands on one are some interesting questions.
Once people know it's possible with off the shelf materials they'll soon seek to replicate it, so it can't remain controlled unless it's hidden, because they will succeed in that attempt to replicate it. Who wouldn't?
What would the average joe do with a humanoid robot that can do most domestic and industrial tasks as well as self replicate?
I just want to say, as a robotics engineer that used to be a CNC machinist and now plasma cuts and welds together farming robots of my own design...
There's not really such a thing (even conceptually) as a humanoid robot that can "self replicate" without a broader robot factory with additional machinery. When you ask "what would the average joe do with a humanoid that can ... self replicate" this sort of misunderstands how robots will be built. Certainly the average joe could ask the robot to go build more if the average joe also had access to a robot factory with CNC machines, metal 3D printers, plastic injection molding machines, PCB fabrication equipment, etc etc. But additional machinery will always be needed.
People in the 3D printer world got really excited about self replicating machines, but motors, cable harnesses, PCBs with lots of different chips on them, metal housings etc still cannot be 3D printed on such machines.
If the average joe has his own robot factory, he's not the average joe. It is theoretically possible that all these different machines will be collapsed in to some sort of single machine - it's hard to say what will happen in 100 years or more - but that's not really anything I would get too worked up about right now.
Imagine a humanoid robot that is comparable to your average joe in terms of dexterity and stamina like let's say as a high water mark it can rebuild a car engine and do basic dentistry for sixteen hours of the day as long as it recharges for the other eight. Let's say that it has the ability to carry a robot of equal weight about 25 km and can repair that fellow robot provided that it has the necessary parts and a basic tool set and the equivalent to your average residential garage type environment to work in[0] (but like really could do it in the field).
If you had a pair of two of these robots and your run of the mill warehouse full of their spare parts (assume a tape of infinite length...) so that with careful planning between the two of them they could do the necessary preventative maintenance on each other so that they didn't break down at the same time, or could go rescue the other if it broke down unexpectedly in the field, how long would it take them to build the infrastructure necessary to produce new parts to replenish their stockpile and generate new robots so that they could experience exponential growth?
When I watch stuff like Primitive Technology[1] I'm in awe at how asingle well-fed and educated human being can with the right preparation and research can go into a jungle setting and speed run up to the iron age. It makes me wonder about the minimum viable number of people and education/knowledge/experience required to do the same thing for realsies to the computer age. It's just a pipe dream or two about when a robot equivalent to the average joe is a thing and when I see videos like the one we're talking about or the recent one from Boston Dynamics the gears in my mind start turning.
There was a time when computers didn't exist. Then they did. At first computers used to be the size of buildings, then they became the size of floors of buildings, then the size of rooms, then the size of appliances[2], and so on and so forth. we're seeing this sort of miniaturization across segments of industry driven in large part by the miniaturization of semiconductors. If you take a big picture view the economy as a whole it is a self replicating machine. As are the vertiable Adam and Eve that made that economy. In a complicated sort of orobourous way the entire economy is made up of humanoids (and let's not forget our quadroped hoven friends who serve as feedstock btw, or chickens and tuna and so on...) who replicate in some way or another.
There is this sort of impending collision between the organic and inorganic self replicating aspects of our economic system. Ribozyme and hominid, compiler and automobile assembly line, what are the difference exactly?
> with careful planning between the two of them they could do the necessary preventative maintenance on each other so that they didn't break down at the same time, or could go rescue the other if it broke down unexpectedly in the field, how long would it take them to build the infrastructure necessary to produce new parts to replenish their stockpile and generate new robots so that they could experience exponential growth?
There is a lot happening here. Really big jumps. Sure, humanoid robots with lots of spare parts could repair each other. You could also just imagine a robot that never broke down for this thought experiment. Still, going from nothing to "can build more complex humanoid robots", even with very persistent workers who never get tired, is an extreme endeavor.
I suppose some day the equipment to build a humanoid could be cheap and accessible to home fabricators. But that equipment still will not just be "a humanoid", it will be specialized machinery. You could certainly have humanoids operate that machine, but I still see this scenario as "imagine you have two humanoids. now imagine you have two humanoids and a humanoid manufacturing machine. they could make infinite humanoids". There is no getting around the fact that a machine that makes humanoids will be a separate machine.
Will it be interesting when that happens? Yes, absolutely.
I suspect that microprocessors might be the sticking point. It's possible to manufacture small integrated circuits in a home lab setting, albeit it's certainly not easy, and you're still reliant on an industrial chemical supply chain for the raw materials. You might even be able to get up to the level of a microcontroller or an older microprocessor. But, as I understand it, modern microprocessors are really difficult to make without very specialised machinery and a lot of proprietary knowledge.
High density data storage would probably also be an issue. And I'm not sure about batteries - I don't know how much proprietary tech is required to make the difference between a basic functional lithium battery versus one that actually stores enough energy to be practical.
I think you're glossing over how massive our factories and supply chains have become to enable today's miniaturization.
Primitive Technology can get you to the iron age, sure, but that's scrap quality. That's the INPUT to our current smelting chain. To make stainless steel you're going to need CO2 and Argon and Nickel and Chromium. That's just one of the structural materials needed, and it's one of the easiest! Polymers are going to be the real challenge...
A bigger problem is gonna be chips. Yes, chips are really small these days. Fabs are not. Fabs take billions of dollars and millions of man-hours to construct. Your robots which are accurate on the scale of millimeters (maybe), are going to need to produce and place optics to nanometer levels of precision (mm->nm is on the same scale as km->mm).
On top of all that, you need to confirm that the thing you're making is the thing you intended to, so you need to measure a bunch of stuff! You're going to need interferometers, CMMs, spectroscopes, electrical test equipment, etc. You can buy all that, sure, but now we're back in the billions of dollars and millions of man-hours territory.
it is hard to imagine the economics of humanoid robots
Their video gives subtle hints at the capabilities they're selling. Once you catch on it's quite startling.
What department of every municipality in the United States would love to get their hands on these?
Law enforcement will be chomping at the bit to get these on the budget. Learned repetitive movement, taking punches, crushing "walnuts", easily packed away in a trunk..
> Then the displaced factory workers flood remaining jobs driving down labor costs and shutting down any prospect of a humanoid machine.
I think the market for consumer humanoid robots would be similar to that of the consumer automotive market. I’d certainly pay the cost of a midrange car to never have to do housework/yardwork again.
We'll likely get straight to the point AI actions or answers will be quietly cherry picked among sponsor-approved ones. People is going to trust AI, just like most did with television and the Internet; pretending that AI won't be polluted by advertising would be foolish. There's just too much money at stake.
> Not to mention the consequences of having your humanoid robot hacked remotely could be quite horrific...
Hacked or not, I would be suspicious of anything closed source and connected to the Internet, especially if it has cameras, mikes, can roam around and possibly access to the local network too.
This robot is insanely cool, but to me the chances that it contains code that phones home to do more than simply upgrading it are too high, like in every closed device.
$16,000! I didn't expect that price until a few years from now. Although it probably will actually be more than that when it releases in (supposedly) 4 months. But it would be a good deal at twice the price. Unitree has a good track record of shipping robots and their H1 is already in the hands of a lot of research universities.
I like that it is short. Humanoid robots should be short. Shorter is lighter, cheaper, less dangerous. If it needs to reach something high it can use a stepladder or whatever.
I doubt the basic model is what is shown in the demonstration, and the other model is priced at "contact sales" which usually means "do much that we don't want to say publicly as it'll put people off if we've not got them drunk, or otherwise stupified, somehow first".
The mind-blowing thing is pricing - this thing starts at just $16K.
We’re going to witness an explosion of affordable humanoid robots in every home & business, and as they become increasingly capable the use cases will be nearly limitless. Think deliveries, cleaning, even childcare (Bicentennial Man, anyone?). I think what will be shocking is just how fast this happens, and they’ll likely outnumber humans at some point.
It looks like they have a direct-drive motor that can operate joints with no gears.[1] Is that right? If they use all direct drive motors, these robots are mechanically simple. No gears, no strings, no pulleys, maybe no separate bearings.
A production line for a custom motor is expensive to set up, but once production is running, each motor is cheap. An encoder is cheap if designed into the motor.
This is the route to volume production.
Machine learning has made the control problem much easier. The classic approach was to work out the dynamics analytically. (I used to struggle with that in the 1990s). That's the old Boston Dynamics approach. Now that's obsolete. BD must be using some machine learning by now. The video of Atlas doing a flip showed the planning process briefly. It was very pre-planned. They must be beyond that by now.
Too bad. It looks a lot like these real direct drive motors.[1] Those are in the same price range, and could get much cheaper if produced in quantity.
The nice thing about direct drive motor robots is that you can't strip the teeth of a magnetic field. Impact forces are not a big problem. Robot gear trains are usually the weak point.
The 8Nm/kg is impressive for the direct driver servo. It's still however a long way off from the 43.3Nm/kg gained by adding a gear box. Direct drive motors have other advantages such as better torque control and no backlash but out side of very novel motor design or making motor diameters impactical it's hard to beat the torque density of a gearbox. Maybe one day.
Watching those direct-drive robots jump and land smoothly is impressive. No problem with shock loads. They look like they're on springs, but there are no springs; it's all magnetic fields in the motor.
With good temperature monitoring and over-speced MOSFETS, those direct drive motors can probably be way overdriven for a few hundred milliseconds. That's probably the future. You don't need that extra power all that often, but sometimes you do.
>We’re going to witness an explosion of affordable humanoid robots in every home & business, and as they become increasingly capable the use cases will be nearly limitless.
For the first year, after that society will collapse as the largely now unemployed low income and middle class arm up and start pillaging for survival.
Boston Robotics is going to really regret spending so many resources on slick YouTube videos over the last decade while competitors were driving down cost this ruthlessly.
$16k is what a wealthy person may spend on a vacation without a second thought. Amazing.
I agree that Boston Dynamics will be left behind due to moving too slowly in adopting AI and scaling manufacturing, but IMO Google looks even more foolish for dropping them. If they had stayed at Google then at least other Google departments could have put their AI into capable robots, instead of those lame robots that the "Everyday Robots" team made before they too were dropped.
It’s pretty clear 25 years in Google is a one trick pony: they make money selling targeted ads and that’s about it.
Now, you could argue in favor that Cloud makes some revenue beyond ads; but are a third tier offering that is only there because ads cash was tossed into a furnace. They are “profitable” now, but there’s no way they’ve made back the money they burned and they won’t for a while.
None of the robotics teams at Google with ever produce anything useful in the market and are pretty much on the chopping block as it is.
I maintain hope for Waymo. But the longer they wait for perfection, the more likely that someone less cautious will win using cheaper sensors and better AI.
BD's success or lack thereof with Atlas is to be seen, given that the electrically actuated one is so recent and they're backed by Hyundai who've show desire in driving down the cost.
Robotics is the next frontier of war since our elites can't find enough idiots to kill/die for them. It's in a bit of equillibrium now since China has the upper hand in Hardware; US in Software. However, at this point, Robotics will rapidly become a natsec issue.
Pray for countries who can't afford R&D in this - they'll get genocided out like flies overnight, if they don't turn themselves over into slaves. We're looking at a the war-robot race by the end of this decade (legged robotics have made proven advances in the past 5y).
I don't think that's going to happen. Most of the robots will be owned (controlled) by civilians or private companies, which will lead to governments losing their monopoly on violence. There will be no more war. If someone is idiot enough to attack someone, there are billions of robots who will quickly destroy the idiot. Overwhelming majority of robots will be owned by those who collaborate to prevent war, and this is without cost, because the same robots will work in homes and factories otherwise.
Governments will have to face the question whether they want the productivity of robots, while losing their monopoly on violence. I think it's inevitable that robots will win, and governments with their police and military forces will become irrelevant. Some governments might try to fight this revolution, and some will accept it quicker.
Also, there's really no need for governments anyway when robots are there to serve humans. It doesn't make sense to collect taxes from robots and then pay other robots to work with those taxes.
Why would anyone care about legged robots, when drones exist. A fast quadcopter with guns/bombs strapped to it is much scarier and much more effective than a slowly walking robot that can be stopped by a 1 meter fence.
That looks really close to be a useful farm hand. $16k for a device that can dig a trench, spread mulch, pick weeds, and harvest stuff off the ground would be pretty awesome.
I need to work on a new update, but we are building an open source farming robot you may be interested in. We move slowly but steadily, and I think this will be much more practical than a humanoid (in the next 10-20 years) for saving time around the farm.
It's been a while, I would like to post a new update. Other engineering work keeps taking priority, but I think I will start writing a new update later this week.
> You will run into energy issues very fast with this as soon as you do anything reasonable with it.
Our goal is specifically to research how to accomplish farming in our roughly 1kw work envelope. I personally believe this is achievable, it just takes a different approach to tools. We will build new custom tools for this. One thing to note is that since the vehicle is autonomous (there is no driver) it can move very slowly if this helps conserve energy. Tractors traditionally use a lot of power to save the driver's time, which is not a constraint for us.
> Like removing weeds, watering, fertilize, ...
I don't see why removing weeds would require more than 1kw. Watering is usually done with fixed pipes laid at the start of the season, rather than machines driving around transporting water. Fertilizing again doesn't require much energy. Our vehicle only draws 60-100 watts while driving on level ground. That leaves plenty of energy for distributing fertilizer (though we are specifically targeting regenerative organic, where fertilizer is not used).
(and similarly that pig waste (urine+feces+time) from pig farms makes good starting soil .. although there are understandable objections to pig farms and to shit in dirt when growing some types of food).
Is "regenerative organic" that tightly insistant upon an immediate closed loop that not even an adjacent worm farm can be mixed in?
Oh certainly manure, compost, and worm castings etc are used. I was thinking those are not normally called "fertilizer", but would usually be referred to by their more specific name. When I said fertilizer is not used, I meant industrially derived chemical fertilizers.
On level ground unloaded the vehicle draws about 60 watts moving at a fast walking pace. Well the old vehicle with larger tires did. Those large wheels added a lot of cost so we moved to some smaller wheels, which do seem to use more energy, maybe 100 watts on level ground.
For weeding, the robot is heavy enough that if you were using a drag tool you wouldn't need extra weight. We might use a robot arm for weeding, not sure. However one of the tricks in regenerative organic is to prepare your soil in such a way as to avoid the need for much weeding during the crop growth cycle.
When I say "fertilizer is not used" I mean industrially-derived chemical fertilizer is not used. We would still need to spread compost and manure, which can be heavy! That would be one of the more energy intensive tasks. Who knows, maybe we will find we need a battery for that task. This would be easy to add. I think many tasks will not require a battery.
In the second link, they use a two wheeled walk behind tractor that is I think 18 horsepower. We will have 1 to 1.5 horsepower effectively, so we will have to re-think some of the tools, but you can see how moving slower with no driver could get us in the ballpark.
Remember, farming can be accomplished by a single human with basic hand tools, and our robot has more power available to it than a single human can output continuously. Of course, humans are a lot smarter which certainly helps, but you can begin to see my reasoning for why I believe our approach is reasonable.
Also watering is usually done with impact sprinklers:
There's something absolutely hilarious to me that their marketing is so strongly emphasizing its Kama Sutra abilities, including a hard pelvic thrust at the end of the marketing materials, when you know, people would like it to mow lawns and fold laundry.
Those walnuts look suspiciously as they were already weakened. There's a way to open walnuts without breaking them by gently inserting a knife with round tip in the weak point where the two shells join on the upper side then rotating it, and it looks like they used the trick to weaken at least a couple walnuts in that bowl.
They do look suspicious, but I've crushed walnuts that actually are that weak (and really light). I think it is a combination of storing conditions and variety.
Is the fact that such robots haven’t hit the market until now due to there being no use for them in the past due to AI not being advanced enough, or only now are motors, sensors and battery tech able to power and run a humanoid effectively? Would building this have been physically infeasible in 2008?
I would say that the rise of manufacturing in China has had a huge impact on the cost of things like this. There is much more manufacturing capacity in the world today than there was in 2008 and it is more accessible on the lower end. I used to order assembled circuit boards in 2008 through a company called Gold Phoenix in China, and it was expensive and slow. Now I order them through JLCPCB and it is cheap and fast. I have been looking at getting some parts 3D printed in stainless steel and they're gonna cost $34 each even in single quantity. Back in 2008 I guess that would have been $600.
Hell, in 2008 the cheapest 3D printer was $25,000. Now a cheap 3D printer is $200.
Also, there would not have been any use for a humanoid robot in 2008. We didn't have the software to understand the world. Note for example this XKCD comic and the notion that "identify whether a photo is of a bird" was considered "virtually impossible".
Robotics has generally been held back by software constraints. Deep neural nets didn't get their start until 2012. In 2008, there would have been no market for a humanoid. This one is being sold as an "agent", a term in this context used to describe something acting based on deep neural networks. That's a viable research area now, but was not in 2008.
Honda debuted Asimo in 2000, so the tech was possible. There were just limited uses and the software was really complex.
It was always software. Humanoid robots could walk up and down stairs and use basic tools, in preprogrammed lab conditions and/or by manual teleoperations since 90s[1], and in theory autonomously since 2010s[2]. Nowadays they just can, thanks to NVIDIA CUDA, but grabbing objects is still sketchy[3].
The annoying thing is the EDU versions (which allow programming) are substantially more expensive than the base versions (IDK if it's a constant ~$10-12k more, or just 3x the price -- I only have the EDU/ENT pricing on the Go2 dog, which I was going to happily pick up for $3k but I want to program it so I'd need to spend >$10k which is beyond impulse buy territory.)
Given how much capital is being invested right now, and how quickly things are improving, it's hard not to imagine cheap robots taking on many jobs that until now have been done by human beings. Much like water always migrates to the lowest accessible point in a lake, jobs always migrate to the lowest-cost option in a market economy.
The hardware is the easy bit (except for hands, but some companies seem to have solved that), but the software is a different story, which is why you see all these staged (some faked - telepresence) videos of laundry folding etc.
Having a humanoid in a factory doing a repetitive task it was trained for is one thing, but having one at home and telling it "go clean up the kids bedroom", or "go put the laundry away", is probably still 20 years in the future.
Given the vision systems we saw from OpenAI yesterday and the one Google will show at I/O today, I'm thinking more like 2 years than 20. Maybe 10 years before they are a commodity that everyone has.
Intelligence, incremental/online learning and autonomy are the things that need to be solved before these would be capable of general tasks in an unstructured setting (e.g. domestic use).
I seriously doubt we'll ever see humanoid form factor robots used in a domestic setting, and even in a factory setting the form factor is basically a gimmick. Why does a factory robot need (or want!) legs when an upper torso on a wheeled base would do the job better?!
It's been 15 years since Google first demoed self driving Prius, and nearly 20 since DARPA Grand Challenge.
All that came to be are small scale testing in couple US cities, and steering wheel stabilization mini computers for mid-to-premium range cars that aren't that better than craft-built implementations from back then.
Ehm... It's impressive in tech terms, but as a solder assistant, nutcracker and not so skilled cooking assistant it's a little bit overpriced..........
We can benefit much from robotics but humanoid for at current state of tech is honestly not much useful. We can benefit from cleaning robots, no need to be humanoid, we can benefit from autonomous wheelbarrows, 4-axis storage assistants and so on, sure they are far less fascinating but they are useful and they can have reasonable price tags TODAY.
Unitree already makes a larger humanoid called H1 that has shipped to customers, and they have manufactured cheap robot dogs in volume for many years. They are a legit company. The only thing questionable here is the price, it'll probably be more than quoted. But it'll still be cheap for a humanoid.
> How much of it is real? You are linking to images of the robot in a static pose.
Last year, I had a chance to see Unitree H1 in action, in person. It's their previous model, a bigger one. Still, it was very real, very capable and very scary. I suppose, the choice to make a smaller G1 is in part to make it less dangerous, both perceptually and because it's less mass and energy.
They demonstrate compliance, impact resistance and the dynamic nature of their control algorithms. It will not break, and it'll keep it's balance. Compliance is also a safety feature when the robot is working around humans. Most of the mechanical design, including gearboxes, must be designed to resist outside impacts, because these impacts cause much larger torques on the joints than the motors itself.
It's much easier to make an 'animatronic' robot which has pre-programmed motions and can't withstand mechanical impacts.
Indeed, this is a pet peeve of mine as well. If the silly notion of Roko’s Basilisk has any merit, I wouldn’t want to be that guy.
Besides, transversing an unstable or uneven surface would seem to be a better test, anyway.
I do however find it amusing that it is also apparently a requirement for a humanoid robot to stand up in the most uncanny way possible.
I might buy the 16k one despite not supporting finger movements that made that video cool. I already have their Go2 robodog and it's insanely well-made.
I was unable to determine whether the website was:
A) Real, straight-up, what-it-says-on-the-tin
or
B) Satire. I mean, who wouldn't want a robot that opens walnuts by smashing them with its fist? What a great party trick! It for sure won't accidentally classify your pet gerbil's head as a walnut, don't be silly.
It's strictly A. Unitree is a pretty bullshit-free company; but since it's coming from China, certain cultural differences can be perceived by the American public.
Yet again very little attention is given to the touch sensing. No sensors on the back and sides of the fingers. I can grasp objects blind folded because of the richness of touch. It is super costly to try to compensate lack of touch with vision and all these robotics companies seem to miss this.
A big problem is the lack of innovation in touch sensing. We mass planar (sometimes flexible) products with millions of little active devices (OLED). Cannot be this hard to assemble a decent touch sensing planar device. It will be like a camera for touch and then all the beautiful neural net techniques can be used.
The US can't compete with China in manufacturing and mass production hardware. All it will take is a good open source multi-modal in 2025 and China wins the AGI race without needing to develop it.
Doubtful, from what i've seen it really seems to be a basic toy bot, it doesn't have a tie in to any big AI models for like putting laundry away which is where the real work remainsi think
Unitree robots are "research" platforms. People buy them to do development on top of them. I think G1 basically follows that route like their Go1 / 2 quadrupled. What they are really good at is to drive down cost for their motor / reducers. I think right now they breakeven for each piece <$100 (of their quadrupled, not sure about G1's. which is insane because the MIT Cheetah design costs ~$300 to manufacture and just motor itself costs ~$70).
Even worse, and likely illegal(!), the warranty has terms that are likely against FTC guidelines, like voiding the warranty if you disassemble the robot. As far as I know, these type of terms are not valid. They also include terms saying your warranty is void if third party service or parts are used - these are also not valid under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act.
https://unitree.com/terms/policy/
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/07/ftc-annou...
https://consumer.ftc.gov/consumer-alerts/2022/07/ftc-says-co...
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/businesspers...
https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/statutes/magnuson-m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...