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“Humanoid robots designed for a variety of tasks can now share a single artificial intelligence ‘brain’ that coordinates their movements in multiple locations simultaneously.”
A UK-based company has announced an AI system that can virtually act simultaneously as a “shared brain” for swarms of robots built for various purposes in factories, services, and homes.
Companies like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and XPeng have shown off prototypes of humanoid robots in recent years, but these demonstrations typically involve the robots working alone.
The British company’s approach is designed to manage multiple humanoid robots together under a single AI.
While shared control systems are already common in industrial robots, it is rare to apply the same approach to robots that rely on human-like movement and manipulation.
The AI system, called KinetIQ, can assign tasks to an entire swarm of robots and control individual movements simultaneously in seconds, according to robotics company Humanoid, which developed the new system.
Data from individual robots is shared across the system and helps improve fleet-wide performance.
In a video published by Humanoid, a woman asks a bipedal humanoid robot to order cocoa powder and olive oil. In the next scene, a wheeled robot in a warehouse-like environment uses five fingers to grab a glass bottle and a soft paper bag, place them in a rigid container box, and then stuff them into a paper bag.
When the ordered item arrives at the house, a bipedal robot unpacks the bag and places the item according to the woman’s voice commands.
Humanoid said the wheeled robots featured in the video are designed for industrial applications such as back-of-store grocery picking, container handling and packaging, while the bipedal robots are intended for use in the service industry and at home.
The company describes the bipedal robot as an “intelligent assistant” capable of voice interaction, online ordering, and grocery handling.
Humanoid has previously been able to make a 179 cm bipedal robot walk in just two days after assembly, a process that typically takes weeks or months for humanoid robotics.
The robot is designed to carry loads of up to 15 kilograms, and the company is positioning it as a response to labor shortages, physically demanding work and unpaid housework.
Humanoid said the features shown in the video have already been tested in a real-world pilot project, and a beta version of the wheeled robot will be available for sale early next year.
For more on this story, watch the video in the media player above.
video editor •Roselyn Min
