The days of a consumer electronics business just announcing a phone and
calling it a day are long gone. At the significant launch ceremony this
morning in Beijing, Xiaomi gave CyberOne the stage after announcing its
foldable news. Lei Jun was joined onstage by the bipedal humanoid robot, who
greeted the CEO and gave him a long-stemmed flower.
The robot doesn't move quite like Atlas or Digit at first impression, but
it's still a promising demo and definitely not a person in a spandex suit
(not that anyone would do that). It represents the most recent example of
Xiaomi's expanding robotics aspirations, which started with vacuums and then
grew to encompass the Spot-like CyberDog from a year ago.
It's difficult to determine where CyberOne fits on the spectrum between
serious pursuit and stage spectacle because many consumer brand
representatives have shown their robotic prowess at events like this,
including Samsung and LG.
I was both nervous and thrilled to interact with him on stage. What did you think of his performance tonight? #CyberOne pic.twitter.com/Je1eXDYEGR
— leijun (@leijun) August 11, 2022
Lei Jun was keen to highlight the company's commitment in the field,
stating, "Xiaomi Robotics Lab self-developed all of CyberOne's AI and
mechanical capabilities. We have made significant investments in R&D in
several fields, including the development of software, hardware, and
algorithms.
Here, a very wide variety of assertions are made, among them the capacity
to perceive human emotions. Xiaomi adds:
Robots that resemble humans use vision to analyze their environment.
CyberOne can see 3D space, as well as identify people, gestures, and
expressions thanks to a self-created Mi-Sense depth vision module and a
combination of an AI interaction algorithm. This enables CyberOne to not
only observe but also comprehend its environment. CyberOne has a
self-created MiAI environment semantics recognition engine and a MiAI vocal
emotion identification engine that allow it to understand 45 different
categories of human emotion and 85 different types of ambient noises in
order to connect with the rest of the world. CyberOne has the ability to
recognize happiness and can even give consolation to the user when they are
unhappy. All of these functions are included into CyberOne's processing
units, which are used in conjunction with a curved OLED module to show
interactive real-time data.
The anticipated real-world uses are just as varied, including anything from
human friendship to factory help. Both of these feature sets will come in
handy in the future, but that's a long way (so to speak) from today's
presentation. For the time being, it makes the most sense to think of
CyberOne as a promising experiment that acts as an excellent brand
ambassador for some of the work being done behind the scenes, similar to,
example, Honda's Asimo.
