They cost about $6,000 and get pitched to fire crews. The researchers who work on them call the machines a novelty.
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Chinese robot dogs on sale in Canada still cannot do much without a person driving them. Security researchers have found flaws that could let someone else take control.
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In Beijing this week, organizers say more than 2,000 humanoid robots are competing in running, table tennis and soccer at the second World Humanoid Robot Games, inside the oval built for the 2022 Winter Olympics.
The displays show real capability, said Jason Peng, an assistant professor of computing science at Simon Fraser University. But the software running each robot is trained for one narrow task, he told National Post in an email. A machine built to dance or play table tennis can do little else.
The machine on sale here is the Unitree Go2, built by a Chinese company that makes both four-legged robots, which the field calls quadrupeds, and two-legged humanoids. An Alberta dealer markets them for fire and rescue crews. In Canada, they start at around $6,000.
Michiel van de Panne has worked with four-legged and humanoid robots for years at the University of British Columbia, where he is a professor emeritus of computer science. Humanoid robots once ran anywhere from $200,000 to a million dollars, he said, and the price of the hardware has plummeted over the past three to 10 years.
The hardware is no longer the hard part, van de Panne said. The software is.
“If someone gives you 100,000 quadrupeds or 100,000 humanoids, okay, now what are they actually good for so far,” van de Panne said. The short-term uses tend to be entertainment, he told National Post in an interview, and the machines are a novelty.
A robot can do a backflip because the move is the same every time, Peng wrote, and software trained to do it can do almost nothing else. Folding a shirt is harder, because the robot has to adjust to how the shirt sits each time.
The one real job emerging for these machines is search and rescue. A robot steered by joystick can be sent into a burning building a firefighter cannot access, feeding back live video, van de Panne said. He co-supervises a PhD student at ETH Zurich working on exactly that. A person driving the robot can finish tasks no robot can do alone.
