After settling in the Lingang New Area for a year and a half, Zhiyuan Robotics, founded by the "prodigy" Peng Zhihui, has announced its mass production and shipment schedule: as the first humanoid robot mass production factory in Shanghai, the first phase of Zhiyuan Robotics has completed production line construction and staff recruitment, and will start production in October, with an expected monthly production scale of over a hundred units. Based on this, the overall shipment of Zhiyuan this year is expected to be around 300 units, while the number of orders far exceeds this amount.
This year marks the commercialization of humanoid robots. In tandem with the commercial process, the intelligent interaction capabilities of humanoid robots are also accelerating. At today's annual new product launch, Zhiyuan Robotics released five new commercial humanoid robot products from the "Expedition" and "Lingxi" families. Peng Zhihui said that drawing on the mature technical grading system from L1 to L5 of autonomous driving, Zhiyuan has divided the evolution of embodied intelligence technology into G1 to G5 (G represents general), and will open source a million real machine and ten million simulation datasets in the fourth quarter of this year, to create an open ecosystem of "everyone makes humanoid robots."
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Threading a needle, pouring water, and unscrewing bottle caps, "Expedition A2" has more dexterous hands.
After watching TV, turn around on the sofa and command the robot to make a drink, and let it move away the 84-pound box that is in the way. At today's launch, Peng Zhihui, who rarely appears in public, interacted with his own robot.
In this simulated family life scene, the humanoid robot Expedition A2 is busy in the kitchen. It is seen opening the juicer cover, putting in a few grapes, then using a wrench to unscrew the cola bottle cap, pouring cola into the juicer, covering the machine cover, clicking the work button, and in a short while, the cola grape juice is done. Finally, it found a cup on the table, poured the drink from the juicer into it, and turned to give it to Peng Zhihui on the sofa in the living room not far away.
In August last year, Zhiyuan Robotics released the first generation of general-purpose embodied intelligence prototype machine Expedition A1. A year later, its second-generation product Expedition A2 has made significant improvements in four aspects: power, perception, communication, and control. Taking power as an example, the number of degrees of freedom of the dexterous hand has increased from 12 to 19, the active degrees of freedom have doubled to 12, and the high-precision force control 7-degree-of-freedom arms can accurately perform various force control tasks such as impedance control, admittance control, and force-position hybrid control. In the demonstration video, this pair of dexterous hands can thread a needle, pour water, play mahjong, and finally give everyone a heart.
It will be implemented in interactive services, marketing, and other fields for the "first show".
Beyond the life scenes shown in the video, the earliest landing scene for humanoid robots may be sales. The launch showed a car purchase scene, where consumers can interact with the robot in real time with language without clicking on the screen. During this time, a consumer said he was thirsty, and after hearing this, Expedition A2 poured him a glass of water and then continued to answer the consumer's questions.
Jiang Qingsong, a partner and vice president of marketing services at Zhiyuan Robotics, revealed that among the 300 humanoid robots sold by Zhiyuan this year, interactive services and marketing account for the largest proportion, followed by industrial scenarios, and it is expected to take another 5-8 years for humanoid robots to enter the home.
Peng Zhihui has formulated a G1-G5 technical evolution route for the development of Zhiyuan Robotics, where G1 is basic automation, G2 is general atomic skills, G3 is end-to-end operational skills, G4 is end-to-end operational large models, and G5 is general artificial intelligence.Currently, the Zhiyuan team is conducting research on G2 and G3. "The most important data for humanoid robots comes from real scenarios. Over the past year, Zhiyuan robots have achieved breakthroughs in the G2 route and have been commercially applied in scenarios such as flexible manufacturing and interactive services," said Peng Zhihui. On the G3 route, the team will embed cognitive reasoning planning large models into the robots, completing a series of end-to-end atomic capability training through data-driven methods, thereby forming a universal skill training framework.
Creating a "human-made humanoid robot" hot ecosystem
Zhiyuan Robotics was established in February 2023 and is one of the most sought-after technology companies in Shanghai last year, having received seven rounds of financing to date. The company's current valuation has reached the unicorn level, that is, 1 billion US dollars.
Since the beginning of this year, Zhiyuan Robotics has been "low-key" a lot, but it is still powerful. "We almost achieve product iteration every month, and the current number of employees in the company has reached more than 300 people, and it is expected to exceed 400 people by the end of the year," said Jiang Qingsong.
At the press conference, Peng Zhihui also announced "One more thing (another thing)", that is, the full-stack open-source robot Lingxi X1. This humanoid robot, which was incubated from X-Lab (Zhihui Jun Laboratory) and has a round head, round brain, and round limbs, has the ultimate standardization as its biggest feature. For example, it only has two modular joint designs that can be easily disassembled and assembled through a simple clamping method; the cost of its six-dimensional force sensor is only a hundred yuan; most of its design materials and codes, including the design drawings of the body, software framework, middleware source code, and basic motion control algorithms, will be open-sourced. This means that it is a humanoid robot that everyone can design and apply.
"The reason for open-sourcing is to create an industrial ecosystem," said Peng Zhihui. The value of technology lies in bringing convenience to humanity. Zhiyuan's goal is not only to develop various robots but also to accelerate the innovation and application of the entire industry through an open ecosystem and win-win cooperation, so that humanoid robots can truly serve all aspects of human life and work, and realize the vision of "intelligent robots creating infinite productivity."