CES has always been a celebration of robots, and this year’s event announced a number of significant robotic developments, including the production-ready new debut of Boston Dynamics’ humanoid Atlas. And there are robots on every showroom floor, and bots often serve as great marketing for the companies involved. It’s not always a completely accurate representation of where commercial development stands at the moment, but it does give visitors a glimpse of where it’s headed. And of course, it’s fun to watch. This week I spent quite a bit of time poring over the bots on display. Here are some of the most memorable encounters I’ve had.
table tennis player
The movie Marty Supreme was released just a month ago, so it’s no surprise that this year’s tournament featured a robot playing ping pong. Chinese robotics company Sharpa has modified a full-body robot to play table tennis against one of its staff members. When I stopped by Sharpa’s booth, the robots were losing 5-9 to their human competitors, and I wouldn’t say the match was particularly fast-paced. Still, the sight of a robot playing table tennis was impressive enough on its own, and I think I know several people whose paddle skills are basically on par with (or slightly inferior to) the robot’s paddle skills. A Sharpa representative said the company’s flagship product is a robotic hand, and the full-body robot debuted at CES to demonstrate hand dexterity.
boxer
One of the exhibits that attracted the most visitors involved robots from Engine AI, a Chinese company that develops humanoid robots. The bot, named T800 (after the Terminator series), was installed in a mock boxing ring and styled like a fighting machine. However, I have never actually seen bots collide with each other. Instead, they were like shadow boxes near each other, never really coming into contact. They were also a bit unpredictable. As one person continued walking from the ring to the audience, the number of onlookers naturally increased. At another point, one of the bots trips, buries its face in the floor, and lies there for a moment before deciding to stand up again. So, while it’s not exactly a Mike Tyson-like situation, the machine still manages to evoke a creepy kind of humanoid behavior that makes for high-quality entertainment. “That looks too much like RoboCop,” one observer could be heard joking.
dancer
Dancing robots have long been a staple of CES, and this year was no exception. This year, the dance move torch was carried by a bot from Unitree, a major Chinese robot manufacturer that has come under scrutiny for potential ties to the Chinese military. Unitree has made a number of impressive announcements about its product base, including a humanoid bot that is said to be able to travel up to 11 miles per hour. There was no evidence of anything malicious at Unitree’s booth this week. However, a lot of bots were just feeling excited.
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The convenience store clerk
I stopped by the booth of Galbot, another Chinese company that says it focuses on multimodal large-scale language models and general-purpose robotics. Galbot’s booth was styled like a convenience store, and the bot appeared to be synced with a menu app. A customer comes to the booth, selects an item from the menu, and the bot picks up the selected item. I selected “Sour Patch Kids,” and the bot dutifully pulled a box from the shelf. The company’s website says the robot has been deployed in many real-world settings, including as a pharmacy assistant in China.
housekeeper
Creating a machine that can fold laundry has long been one of the central goals of the commercial robotics community. The ability to pick up and fold a T-shirt is considered a basic test of automated ability. So I was pretty impressed with the exhibit from Dyna Robotics, a company that develops advanced interaction models for automated tasks. There, a pair of robotic arms could be seen efficiently folding laundry and placing it in piles. Dyna representatives said the company already has partnerships with many hotels, gyms and factories.
One such company, a representative told me, is Monster Laundry, based in Sacramento, California. Monster integrated Dyna’s shirt-folding robots into its operations late last year and now calls itself “the first laundry center in North America to feature Dyna’s state-of-the-art robotic folding system.”
Dinah also has great support. The company closed a $120 million Series A funding round in September, which included funding from Nvidia’s NVentures, as well as Amazon, LG, Salesforce, and Samsung.
butler
I also stopped by LG’s section at CES to take a look at the company’s new home robot, CLOid. It was cute, but it wasn’t the fastest bot. You can read my full review of that experience here.
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