A new video shows a humanoid robot appearing to perform a bunch of household chores with enormous skill, and according to its creator, the footage plays at actual speed, with no teleoperation involved. Check it out below:
As you can see, the video shows the humanoid robot performing an array of tasks in various home settings, from drawing the curtains and watering the plants to tidying up and even delivering gifts.
What isn’t clear is just how autonomous the robot is, and how well it would be able exist alongside humans inside a regular home. After all, the chores appear to have been carefully set up, with no footage showing the robot moving between each one but rather at the point of beginning each task. As one commenter on X notes, even the opening clip shows the robot holding the curtains right from the start, leaving us to wonder how long it took the robot to grab them, with delicate hand-related maneuvers known to be one of the biggest challenges for robots.
Still, the robot’s movements in the video seem natural and fluid, and overall its actions look very impressive.
The remarkable display is down to the efforts of a recently founded China-based startup called MindOn. But the robot itself was built by Unitree, a tech company that’s featured on Digital Trends many times already. What MindOn did was purchase Unitree’s G1 robot and then design a “brain” that enables it to perform the tasks demonstrated in the video.
Unitree’s versatile G1 robot is becoming a popular choice for roboticists keen to try out their software on a humanoid robot, with engineers at the likes of MIT and Stanford also using it in their own research.
MindOn was co-founded by Zhou Qinqin, a former research engineer at Tencent Robotics, who studied mechatronic engineering at the Beijing Institute of Technology. Qinqin developed control algorithms that have been successfully applied in several Tencent robot products, and she also holds a number of robot control patents.
The idea of a home-based robot is an exciting one, though it could still be years before such a product becomes widely available.
California-based Figure recently unveiled its own robotic “butler,” but for now it’s undergoing testing, while 1X Technologies’ new NEO robot requires a remote operator for more challenging tasks.
