Comment by SilverElfin
4 days ago
Impressive … and scary. Why is it that this company is moving so fast when others like Boston Dynamics don’t seem to have made much progress?
4 days ago
Impressive … and scary. Why is it that this company is moving so fast when others like Boston Dynamics don’t seem to have made much progress?
Chinese work ethic driven by overproduction of STEM majors leading to 25% youth unemployment...also they probably stole a lot of the fundamental stuff that was super hard to produce but easy to copy and build on top of.
On the other side: Years of VC focusing on the next great app to make you some cooked eggs instead of investing in companies operating in the physical world.
Their earlier robots (A1, Go 1) have a lot of lineage from Ben Kats' (from MIT) Mini Cheetah project, even down to the shape of the communication protocols used for motor control. I've not had the chance to closely inspect their newer robots, so I can't tell you what's their secret sauce, but I suspect it has as much to do with RL-based control and software as it does with hardware improvements.
I often hear about "muh china stealing", two questions come to mind:
1. how could they steal something that western companies dont even have yet?
2. for more fundamental stuff, western companies did transfer knowledge themselves by moving factories to China, in exchange for decades of access to China market and exorbitant profits they earned. Where exactly is "supposed stealing" in unitree ?
Boston Dynamics has been at the game for a LONG time (1992 vs Unitree's 2016). During that time they slogged through a lot of fundamental work that from the outside looked like 0 but thats the thing about tech, it starts at 0.01% then increases 0.01% → 0.02% → 0.04% → 0.08% → 0.16% → 0.32% → 0.64% and so on. The world just sees 0 until they don't. If you are able to just take all the results of those years and skip the same effort required then combined with your own skilled and motivated people you can leapfrog them.
(Im basically rewording my original comment, you didn't get my point the first time)
The answer to both your questions, and the poster's obvious implication, is that somehow they stole information from Boston Dynamics. (I'm not saying I believe that.) Seems like they must've stolen the information at the exact point in time when advances in AI made these physical robots much more easy for anyone to engineer without theft...
Steal info from 10 different companies, and combine it to make a product better than any of the 10 individual products copied.
It's basically the patent problem.
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Idk about work ethic, but what are the chances it's a 996 company?
All Chinese companies are 996 companies and any that arent will eventually be replaced by a 996 company. Again vast oversupply of STEM labor serves as a forcing function(but is not the only reason).
There's no use for these robots(even militarily). It's very high tech, but that's it.
Veho[1] is experimenting[2] with similar kinds of robots for package delivery.
[1] https://www.shipveho.com/rivr
[2] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d6jU_4XjkTU
You say that now, but wait until one of these is charging at you across a field with a QBZ-95 strapped to its back and a 1024 resolution thermal sensor.
I'd be more scared of MQ-9 dropping a JDAM or R9X on my head than this thing running around. They're proven to be undetectable to human targets. That's scarier to me than this thing running around catching wires and bushes.
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Not this robot. You can see that none of the videos where the robot is careering downhill or rolling fast over rough terrain shows it carrying any load at all. Since those are the best-of, carefully curated videos, painstakingly chosen to show off the system's capabilities at its best you can rest assured that the robot can't manoeuvre like shown in the videos with any load at all.
There's a video where it's going uphill over uneven terrain with a load at a much slower pace, which is the same as what Big Dog could do 21 years ago, and another one where it's shown rolling up a smooth, grassy slope while loaded, which is pretty meh.
And that's just carrying a load. Now, you want it to carry an assault rifle and fire it? Like, at enemy targets? And hit them?
You will need to wait for a couple of major breakthroughs in robotics and AI still, I'm afraid.
You wait until they mount them with a chainsaw.
Or five. One on each leg and one ON THE FACE!
And then a tiny little one on the bum like a cutesy tail <3
You are assuming this thing is real and not just a web page.
Not that you have much reason to believe a stranger on the internet, but I have seen this in person.
Not doing acrobatics like the marketing video of course, just doing mundane things like going from point A to point B.
Unitree is a huge well known company. You think they'd fake this?
The demo images look AI generated, so I can understand the impression that this is vaporware. The demo videos look very real to me however.
they're a chinese company and this is a VC funded western company; so that's half the answer.
The other half is yes, of course, any company will fake it till they make it.
But Unitree is definitely making robots.
is using a prototype firmware or hardware platform faking it when you're showing exclusive prototype capabilities and trying to pass them off as reproducible by the production unit?
unitree has done this consistently.
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