A few months back, China's Robot Era demonstrated the strolling capabilities of its XBot-L humanoid by setting it loose on the Great Wall of China. Now the company has released video footage of two flagship Star1 models racing through the Gobi Desert.
Robot Era is a fairly recent addition to the humanoid robot space, having incubated from Tsinghua University in August 2023. But the company already has a number of humanoids in its robot ranks, has developed a dexterous human-like hand, and become quite adept at showing off its creations in fun promo videos.
The latest footage was shot late last month and features the company's new flagship humanoid robot, Star1. Well two of them actually, racing against each other on rocky routes, grassy vistas and winding roads along parts of the Gobi Desert. One runs "bare-footed" while the other benefits from a snazzy pair of sneakers.
Sadly, we don't know a great deal about the flagship running bot, but we can tell you that it stands 1.71 m tall (5.6 ft) and tips the scales at 65 kg (143 lb). Its odd running gait sees the body remain straight-backed upright while its jointed legs push out front in a style that would likely gain full approval from the Ministry of Silly Walks.
"Controlling a robot's limbs and dynamic center of gravity is essential for enabling autonomous movement on rugged terrain," explained Robot Era. "For instance, navigating soft or uneven surfaces, like those found in Danxia landforms, demands flexible, adaptive joints that can absorb impacts and adjust to surface irregularities. Conversely, traversing hard road surfaces requires tighter joint control for stability, necessitating the robot to modulate the stiffness or flexibility of its joints for smooth movement and fall prevention."
The company reports that the sneaker-clad humanoid started late but quickly caught its opponent before taking the lead, running at up to 3.6 meters per second (8 mph) for a total of 34 minutes.
Both bots feature proprietary 400-Nm (295-lb.ft) joint motors that include "precision planetary reducers, high-precision encoders, and drivers" along with high-speed comms modules. AI computing at up to 275 tops helps them perceive the world around them and adjust to different terrain.
"The Star1 integrates AI and large language model technologies," said Robot Era in a press statement. "Trained on an end-to-end neural network, the STAR 1 quickly learns new skills and adapts to various tasks. This versatility enables it to switch between three modes of gait – running, walking, and jumping – in the face of different terrains, including roads, grass, deserts, and uneven surfaces.
"Thanks to its built-in AI model, the Star1 supports both imitation learning and reinforcement learning. Robot Era equipped this model with extensive walking and running experience through rigorous simulation training in virtual environments."
The company also claims to have developed the first "denoising world model" – which allows the humanoid to "predict and extract key environmental information from simulation training, minimizing real-world interference with its tasks."
Robot Era says that this test run "aimed to highlight the robot's adaptability to real-world natural environments" as part of its mission to bring general purpose humanoids powered by artificial intelligence into households and workplaces.
And the rush is on to tap into what's expected to be a very lucrative market, with the Star1 just the latest in an increasingly long line of hopefuls from the likes of Tesla, Figure, Unitree and Fourier – to name a few.
Source: Robot Era
