It’s something right out of dystopian works, but humanoid robots are slowly becoming a reality. Following in the footsteps of Boston Dynamics’ athletic android Atlas, Xiaomi has announced its very own iteration: the CyberOne, but with none of the parkour flair.
The bipedal robot made its grand entrance during the company’s launch event in Beijing, where he greeted CEO Lei Jun and handed him a flower onstage. It’s the latest sign of Xiaomi’s growing robotics ambitions, which have now expanded to include the Cyberdog that made its first appearance at Waterway Point in Singapore earlier this year.
Between this and the other robotic muscle that has been shown off by other consumer brands like LG, it’s unclear where the CyberOne stands in terms of functionality. However, the Chinese giant is touting some serious real-life applications, including the ability to read human emotions.
“Humanoid robots rely on vision to process their surroundings. Equipped with a self-developed Mi-Sense depth vision module and combined with an AI interaction algorithm, CyberOne is capable of perceiving 3D space, as well as recognising individuals, gestures, and expressions, allowing it to not only see but to process its environment,” reads the official statement.
“In order to communicate with the world, CyberOne is equipped with a self-developed MiAI environment semantics recognition engine and a MiAI vocal emotion identification engine, enabling it to recognize 85 types of environmental sounds and 45 classifications of human emotion. CyberOne is able to detect happiness, and even comfort the user in times of sadness. All of these features are integrated into CyberOne’s processing units, which are paired with a curved OLED module to display real-time interactive information,” it adds.
Apart from the added emotional intelligence, the robot will also be able to render assistance for manufacturing and offer human companionship — as human as it can go, at least.
Si Jia is a casual geek at heart – or as casual as someone with Sephiroth’s theme on her Spotify playlist can get. A fan of movies, games, and Japanese culture, Si Jia’s greatest weakness is the Steam Summer Sale. Or any Steam sale, really.
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