CES has always been a great event for robotics, and this year’s event saw the announcement of a number of important developments in robotics, including the new production-ready debut of Atlas, a robot from Boston Dynamics. Then there were all the robots in the showroom, as robots often serve as good marketing for the companies involved. If they don’t always provide a completely accurate representation of where trade publishing is right now, they give visitors a sneak peek at where it might be headed. Of course, it’s certainly fun to look at. I spent a fair amount of time following the bots on display this week. Here are some of the most memorable ones I’ve encountered.
Ping pong player
The movie Marty Supreme It just came out a month ago, so I think it’s only fitting that there’s a ping-pong-playing robot at this year’s convention. The Chinese Sharpa robotics company He outfitted a full-body robot to play competitive table tennis against a company employee. When I stopped at the Sharpa booth, the robot was losing to its human opponent, 9-5, and I wouldn’t describe the game that was taking place as particularly fast-paced. However, the sight of seeing a robot playing ping-pong was impressive in itself, and I’m sure I’ve known some humans whose paddling skills were on par (or slightly worse) than the robot’s. A Sharpa representative told me that the company’s flagship product is its robotic hand, and that the full-body robot debuted at CES to demonstrate the hand’s dexterity.
Boxer
One of the exhibits that attracted the largest crowds were robots from the Chinese company EngineAIwhich develops humanoid robots. The robots, dubbed the T800 (a nod to the Terminator franchise), were housed in a mock boxing ring and designed as fighting machines. However, I’ve never seen any of the robots hit each other. Instead, they will act as a shadow box close each other, and they don’t actually make any contact. They were also a little unpredictable. Someone kept leaving the ring and entering the crowd, which naturally caused the number of spectators to rise. At another point, one of the robots tripped over its own feet and then settled face down on the ground, where it lay for a while before deciding to get up again. So, not exactly a Mike Tyson situation, but machines were still able to conjure up a frightening kind of human behavior that made for high-quality entertainment. “This looks a lot like Robocop,” I heard one observer quip.
Dancer
Dancing robots have long been a staple at CES, and this year was no different. This year, the dance torch was carried by robots from Unitree, a major Chinese robot manufacturer. Checked For possible relations with the Chinese army. Unitree has made a number of impressive announcements around its product base, including a humanoid robot that will supposedly be able Run at speeds up to 11 mph. I saw no evidence of anything nefarious at the Unitree stand this week, just a lot of robots feeling the groove.
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Store clerk
I stopped by the booth of Galbot, another Chinese company that says it focuses on large multimodal language models and general-purpose robots. The Galbot kiosk is designed to look like a convenience store, and its robot appears to be synced with the menu app. The customer comes to the kiosk, chooses an item from the menu, and then the robot goes and brings them the selected goods. After I selected Sour Patch Kids, the robot retrieved a box for me from the shelf. According to the company’s website, the robot has been deployed in a number of real-world settings, including as an assistant In Chinese pharmacies.
housekeeper
Creating a machine that can fold laundry has long been one of the core ambitions of the commercial robotics community. The ability to pick up a shirt and fold it Basic test of mechanical efficiency. That’s why I was so impressed by the presentation from Dyna Robotics, a company that develops advanced processing models for robotic tasks. There, a pair of robotic arms can be seen efficiently folding laundry and placing it in a pile. A Dyna representative told me that the company has already established partnerships with a number of hotels, gyms, and factories.
The representative told me that one of those companies is Monster laundryheadquartered in Sacramento, California. Monster integrated the Dyna folding robot into its operations late last year, and now describes itself as “the first laundry center in North America to debut a state-of-the-art Dyna automated shirt-folding system.”
Dyna also has some impressive support. It concluded with $120 million Series A fundraising round In September, this included funding from Nvidia’s NVitures, as well as from Amazon, LG, Salesforce and Samsung.
butler
I also stopped by the LG section at CES to take a look at the new CLOid home robot. He was cute but wasn’t the fastest robot in the group. You can read my full review of that experience here.
