Just like in a year or two you will start to see more appendages than just two arms on humanoids.
Literally we have a very old saying that is "don't reinvent the wheel" and yet people persist in doing so, when an already near optimal design exists.
I'm not saying don't do anything new and novel but that if a large portion of the design has already been done for you and you can improve it, like this company has done (wheels on the end of legs!), why not try that first and see if it works before starting over.
A hub motor for each leg adds some weight, but you get a rolling mode on flat terrain with great range.
At the same time you keep obstacle climbing mode with stationary wheels, and can use the leg actuators as shock absorbers and obstacle avoidance on a bumpy path. Best of both worlds, with a new software challenge.
relevant link.
I remember watching this video with the takeaway: if you want it secure, build it yourself... which is what I am currently doing.
1. We need the capability to build the servos, actuators, etc. Supply chain, factories, specialized vendors.
2. We need to dump the firmware, decompile it, extract the models, and liberate it all. AI will help immensely with that. We can literally hijack everything software that isn't delivered over cloud now - so this is the easy part. We can then fine tune, adapt to new tasks, etc. Grabbing the brain = easy.
So the hard part is the hardware itself. The brain will belong to us soon enough.
Robotics distillation will be a big thing. You won't even have to farm out billions of requests across residential gateways. You just need to buy one unit.
You can't stop the software from becoming open.
Startup idea: AI model to dump the firmware from DJI, Unitree, etc. etc. and turn it into human-readable code. Broad utility across every industry with tons of willing buyers.
Hardware, though. We need that part.
its either rolls perfectly without traction or walks uphill with perfect traction ?
is it AI generated video or did they make some groundbreaking success ?
or is it just promo video, showing future potential, not yet developed capabilities ?
On the other side: Years of VC focusing on the next great app to make you some cooked eggs instead of investing in companies operating in the physical world.
1. how could they steal something that western companies dont even have yet?
2. for more fundamental stuff, western companies did transfer knowledge themselves by moving factories to China, in exchange for decades of access to China market and exorbitant profits they earned. Where exactly is "supposed stealing" in unitree ?
Not doing acrobatics like the marketing video of course, just doing mundane things like going from point A to point B.
unitree has done this consistently.
The other half is yes, of course, any company will fake it till they make it.
But Unitree is definitely making robots.