Norwegian robotics company 1X announced its newest home robot, Neo Gamma, on Friday. The humanoid system will take over Neo Beta, which debuted in August. Like its predecessor, Neo Gamma is a prototype designed for testing in a home environment. Images of the robot show that they are performing many household tasks, such as making coffee, doing laundry, and vacuuming.
According to 1X, Bipedal Robot is set to go outside the lab with limited domestic testing, but it quickly adds that Gamma is a long way from commercial scaling and deployment.
Neo Gamma represents a softer side of the humanoid industry, both figuratively and literally. 1X has built a welcoming robot with a more friendly design and suit made of knit nylon. The latter is designed to reduce potential injuries that can arise from robot-to-human contact.
Neo Gamma arrives in the sea of humanoids from companies such as Agility, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Figure, and Tesla. Companies like Figures already have their robotic systems running in mock home environments within the lab, but everything prioritizes warehouse and factory deployment. 1X’s home-first approach makes it unique among your immediate friends.
Home robots have always been a tricky proposal. No one has made a meaningful invasion of the market beyond the robot vacuums produced by companies like iRobot. This is not due to a lack of attempts – technology simply does not exist.
Home robots need to be more convenient, reliable, affordable and significantly safer than industrial counterparts. This is doubly true given that age technology is likely to be one of the key targets of home humanoids. As the average age of the population increases, independent living for older people becomes an increasingly important technical goal.
In addition to the softer shell, 1x points to advances in Gamma’s onboard AI systems as a key element in the design of safer robots. These systems need to be very aware of their surroundings to avoid potential harm to people and property. Remote control is also an important part of the safety conversation. While full autonomy is mostly the ultimate goal, it is important that humans are in a pinch, especially at home, that they can control the system.
Beyond its unique focus, one times surpassed many of the industry’s radar when Openai was announced as an early backer. For many, the concept of embodied intelligence – AI with physical existence – is the next logical step in the heated world of generated AI. Openai has since hedged bets in humanoid space, both in its competitors, figure investments and many rumors surrounding ChatGpt makers’ own in-house robotics ambitions.
Generating AI has an important role to play in humanoids, such as creating more natural human-robot language interactions. Similar to the illustration, 1X builds its own in-house model designed to improve both the robot’s voice and body language. Of Gamma’s new and improved features, how many of the company’s work with Openai or the results of the January acquisition of Bay Area startup Kind Humanoid is unknown.
1X does not reveal the number of NEO gammas produced over the lifetime of the beta robot. Meanwhile, the product video accompanying Friday’s launch is best seen as evidence of the concept of how one of Neo’s works behaves in a home environment.
We see the initial humanoid deployment moving beyond the pilot stage of the industrial environment, but these systems are pricing, reliability and safety before we have a serious conversation about bringing them into the home. , has come a long way in terms of functionality.
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