Folks.

The next year in humanoid robotics is going to get deeply weird and will result in products I’ll be uncomfortable talking about.

A movie you’ve seen more than 7 times with a gif.

Wildly ambitious. 1X is actually selling robots for home use and chores.

We’ll learn how useful and reliable these things are very quickly.

I’m thrilled to be a researcher and Outreach Director for the Integrative Movement Sciences Institute.

This incredible scientific research center unites over 20 biology, physics, and engineering professors and their students to study how humans and animals move.

New Unitree humanoid dropped — the H2. 5’10” and 155lbs.

I’ll be honest, I don’t get the mannequin face. The neck doesn’t seem articulated, so it’s not like it will express more convincingly human or something.

Looks like they’ve scaled up their G1 design instead of directly iterating on the H1-2.

Incredible.

Humanoids are now *extremely* good at imitating human motion while balancing.

It’s called “motion retargeting”. It burst onto the humanoids scene just two years ago. Now it’s everywhere. It’s limited to preset choreography (it’s not improvising the moves) but it makes fantastic demos.

Waterproof humanoid from Deep Robotics.

Neat but very "cart before the horse." Transparently so.

New result: a drone that can screw on a lightbulb

But it's more than that. Right now, the best robot hand controllers work very differently than our best locomotion controllers--they don't coordinate very well.

Seems like a good step toward making them work together, and for more than just flying.

I’ll highlight the best part—the balance.

They train it in a computer simulation, pushing it at random times during while attempting to execute the performance. That’s why it can take a shove, and can shimmy on one foot to rebalance.

While not fully new, it’s uncommon for a full-size humanoid.

If it’s like other companies, they’re doing motion retargeting using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). That’s different than their typical balancing which is more traditional.

It’s cleaner than their prior DRL results👇, but likely because it’s designed to imitate the symmetry of human performance.

Good martial arts routine from Tesla.

It’s trained to do a pre-choreographed routine and the human is playing along.

I’ll wonk out more in the replies, but in short, their balance control is getting much better (other companies have too) but this is mostly a party trick.

It's unclear if these security vulnerabilities are intentional or just mistakes.. but either isn't good.

And by everywhere, I mean these things are everywhere. Here's one strutting around West Hollywood in pride decor.

Karalyn Davis via Storyful.
www.youtube.com/shorts/OveZn...

This is the Unitree G1. You're seeing these robots all over because they're cheap (less than a car).

But techies keep finding security flaws: they secretly stream location data to China--and might be susceptible to remote takeover.

spectrum.ieee.org/unitree-robo... via @evanackerman.bsky.social