Recently, UBTECH officially released a new generation of industrial humanoid robot Walker S1, and has entered the automotive factory training, working in collaboration with L4 unmanned logistics vehicles, unmanned forklifts, industrial mobile robots and intelligent manufacturing management systems, which is also the world's first industrial scenario solution for collaborative operation of humanoid robots and unmanned logistics vehicles.
As an important part of the solution, the Walker S series industrial humanoid robot is committed to creating an application paradigm for multi-task industrial scenarios through continuous training and technology upgrading, starting from the application requirements of industrial scenarios such as safety, reliability, stability, practicability, and high load.
"Entry" is the most practical training of car factories, which is born for industrial scene applications
Since the beginning of this year, UBTECH has focused on key manufacturing areas such as automobiles and 3C, improved the operation and task execution capabilities of humanoid robot tools, and took the lead in the world in cooperating with Dongfeng Liuzhou, Geely Automobile, FAW Hongqi, FAW-Volkswagen Qingdao Branch, Audi FAW, BYD and other automobile companies, and has cooperated with many industry leaders including Foxconn and SF Express across industries to achieve large-scale and in-depth application in typical manufacturing scenarios and build a humanoid robot application ecology. Up to now, UBTECH is the only humanoid robot company in the world that has announced cooperation with a number of car companies, and the Walker S series has also become the humanoid robot that has entered the world's most practical training in car factories.
At present, UBTECH Walker S1 has entered BYD's factory to carry out handling task training, and has realized the world's first collaborative operation of humanoid robots and unmanned logistics vehicles, unmanned forklifts, industrial mobile robots and intelligent manufacturing management systems, helping to realize the unmanned and large-scale commercial landing of indoor and outdoor logistics scenarios. This time, the Walker S1 entered BYD's training, which is the world's No. 1 new energy vehicle sales, marking a new milestone for UBTECH to enter the training of humanoid robot factories.
According to the "Manufacturing Talent Development Planning Guide" released by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Education, by 2025, the shortage of manufacturing workers in China will be close to 30 million, with a gap rate of 48%. Humanoid robots, with their advantage of being more adaptable to unstructured environments, are expected to alleviate the demand for labor in the manufacturing industry. Based on the current experience of practical training in many car manufacturers, UBTECH has carried out several iterations of the Walker S series within one year to meet the application needs of industrial scenarios. At present, the Walker S series has received more than 500 orders from car manufacturers.
Software and hardware upgrades and iterations to solve three key problems
In order to achieve efficient collaboration with unmanned logistics vehicles, unmanned forklifts, industrial mobile robots and intelligent manufacturing management systems, UBTECH Walker S1 has innovated and iterated on hardware performance such as integrated joint technology, integrated head design, and humanoid dexterous hands, so that the robot has more stable and reliable limbs and more agile and flexible operation capabilities.
In terms of integrated joint technology, the Walker S1 adopts an innovative rotary drive, including the integration and innovation of multiple key components such as servo drives, frameless torque motors, reducers, encoders, etc., with the characteristics of high performance, high torque and high integration, which effectively improves the motion performance and stability level of the humanoid robot, and at the same time makes the Walker S1 highly modular and strongly supports future mass production and delivery.
In terms of integrated head design, the Walker S1 innovatively uses a panoramic fisheye camera in both ears for the first time, combined with an RGBD camera, which can achieve 360° safety monitoring and all-round perception of the robot's surrounding environment and operating range. In addition, the head of the Walker S1 also integrates vision, light language and voice interaction, and can inform itself of the status of work and the completion of tasks in real time through different ways.
In the humanoid dexterous hand, the Walker S1 is connected to the third-generation humanoid dexterous hand self-developed by UBTECH. With 6 arrayed tactile pressure sensors, grip strength can be precisely monitored, providing reliable hardware support for the Walker S1 to perform delicate operations. The dexterous hand also has a full-stack dexterous operation strategy library, which can train the corresponding skill library according to the generalization capability requirements of industrial scenarios to achieve a variety of general skills. In addition, the Walker S1 can replace the end effector and can walk with a weight of 15 kg on both hands, which is the most common handling task in industrial scenarios.
In addition, UBTECH has also independently developed the robot operating system application framework ROSA2.0 between the underlying operating system and the upper-level business application, which can schedule the algorithm module system deployed on the robot ontology on the basis of a unified internal software research and development platform, so as to ensure the autonomy, controllability and security of the underlying algorithm. In industrial scenarios, ROSA2.0 can support the development of multiple applications of humanoid robots, the collection of perception and action data, the collaborative scheduling of multi-robot work, and the rapid access of the dispatching management system of the car factory.
It is worth mentioning that UBTECH Walker S1 focuses on solving three important challenges encountered in the process of training in the car factory, including visual positioning under lighting and environmental changes, operation control algorithm under dynamic high load conditions, and joint heat dissipation under high load and long-term working conditions, so as to ensure that it can perform work tasks stably and efficiently in industrial application scenarios.
Key technologies of embodied intelligence are tackled to meet the needs of industrial scenarios
Compared with the previous generation of Walker S, UBTECH has developed key technologies of embodied intelligence such as multi-modal programming large model for general tasks, semantic VSLAM, and learning motion control based on the full-stack technology of humanoid robots, giving Walker S1 a smarter brain and agile cerebellum to meet the needs of generalized applications in industrial scenarios, thus further promoting the commercialization and industrialization process of humanoid robots.
By fusing and training a multi-modal programming model for general tasks and using simulation scenarios and real data to build embodied intelligent data, UBTECH aligns the sensor data with the corresponding actions of the robot, making the Walker S1 have advanced intent understanding and fine-grained task planning capabilities, and its innovative application and implementation difficulty belong to the first echelon level of the industry in the world.
At the same time, UBTECH's self-developed semantic VSLAM navigation technology realizes two-stage semantic navigation from coarse to fine by designing a tight coupling method between semantic perception information and traditional VSLAM, which effectively improves Walker S1's ability to understand space, and is currently the first in the humanoid robot industry. In addition, UBTECH's unique whole-body motion control framework with integrated sensing and control and end-to-end learning effectively supports the dexterous operation and stable walking of the Walker S1, and improves its ability to generalize and perform complex unstructured tasks.
In the future, with the wide application of humanoid robots, the contradiction between supply and demand of manpower in the manufacturing industry is expected to be further alleviated. As a representative of new quality productivity, humanoid robots will help promote new industrialization and empower high-quality development.