A year after Tesla announced the Tesla Bot, Xiaomi has announced its first full-size humanoid bionic robot. Xiaomi CyberOne is Xiaomi’s second robotic product and it comes a year after the announcement of the Xiaomi Cyberdog, which it unveiled at its Fall 2021 launch event. Like most other humanoid robots, most aspects of the Xiaomi CyberOne are still “work in progress”.
Xiaomi claims that future evolved variants of the robot will not only have a high degree of emotional intelligence, but will also gain the ability to perceive human emotions. The first generation CyberOne shown on stage seemed to have trouble walking, but work is being done to improve its ability to master the art of movement on two legs.
Xiaomi claims that the CyberOne humanoid robot uses a combination of complex mechatronics and artificial intelligence developed by Xiaomi’s robotics division, Xiaomi Robot Labs. Although the product is in its first generation, the company claims that it has invested a significant amount considerable resources and manpower to develop the CyberOne. Although the development of any bionic robot carries its share of complexity, things get even more complicated if the robot under development is humanoid. CyberOne is also perhaps one of the largest humanoid robots in existence, standing at 177 centimeters tall and weighing just over 52 kg. It is about the same size as an average human. Other robot capabilities include responding to queries in real time and carrying small objects up to 1.5kg with one hand. To ensure the weight of the robot was kept under control, Xiaomi engineers had to adhere to strict weight limitations. These restrictions eventually allowed them to limit the weight of the motor that drives the limbs to just 500 grams. The main motor, located around the hip joint, can exert a maximum torque of more than 300Nm, Xiaomi claims. At the launch event, Xiaomi also talked about its Mi-Sense depth vision module, used in the CyberOne. Together with Xiaomi’s own developed algorithms, these technologies seem to give CyberOne the ability to perceive space in three dimensions. This algorithm also gives the robot the ability to identify specific people, gestures and their facial expressions. Thanks to the MiAl environmental semantic recognition engine and the MiAl speech emotion recognition engine, Xiaomi CyberOne can distinguish between 85 different types of environmental sounds. In cases where verbal communication is not enough, the curved OLED display on the head can be used to display interactive content and related information in real time. Xiaomi has made it very clear that the first generation of Xiaomi CyberOne is just the company’s first step towards developing advanced humanoid robots. So it will be a while before any of these products make it into our homes.
