Researchers from China have created a motion-tracking wearable suit that allows human beings to teach robots how to walk.
China ’s National University of Defense Technology has partnered with appliance maker Midea Group to introduce HumanoidExo. It is a system with a wearable suit that records full-body motion for robots to learn from humans.
The system was introduced in a research paper published last week.Humanoids often lose balance because their training data comes from videos and simulations. HumanoidExo solves that issue by capturing humans’ real-time motion through wearable suits.The system tested a Unitree G1 humanoid robot; it managed to learn complex actions and emulate a human walk only after studying a few examples.“A significant bottleneck in humanoid policy learning is the acquisition of large-scale, diverse datasets, as collecting reliable real-world data remains both difficult and cost-prohibitive,” the researchers wrote.The HumanoidExo systemThe wearable suit in the HumanoidExo system tracks seven joints in the wearer’s arms and connects them to the robot’s movements. It uses motion sensors on the wrists and a LiDAR scanner on the back to follow how the person’s body and height change as they move.A two-part AI system then processes the captured motion called HumanoidExo-VLA. One part, the Vision-Language-Action model, understands what task the person is doing.The other part, a reinforcement learning controller, helps the robot stay balanced and stable while it learns to walk.The experiment with Unitree G1The researchers used five teleoperated and 195 exoskeleton-recorded sessions to train the Unitree G1. The combined data increased the robot’s success rate on a pick-and-place task from just 5% to nearly 80%, coming close to the performance achieved with 200 human demonstrations.The exoskeleton captured a person walking to a table and learned to walk even though its direct training data had no walking instructions. The researchers are confident that it has a 100% success rate in its ability to manipulate objects without using balance.In one of the tests, researchers physically pushed the robot away from its work area. It successfully walked back to its position and completed the task.The global scenarioThe study comes amid a global rush in humanoid robot research. Companies like NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Figure are already working on large-scale robot training.Paris-based exoskeleton company Wandercraft, known for showcasing its Atalante X suit at the 2024 Summer Olympics, has shifted its focus to humanoid robotics, unveiling its new robot Calvin 40 in June.“We’re seeing humanoid robots everywhere—in the U.S., China, from Tesla, from Figure AI,” said Wandercraft CEO Matthieu Masselin, previously reported by Decrypt.“For us, it’s the same technology we’ve been developing for the last 10 years, he said.“Once we began getting more requests and people pulled us into that market, it made sense to develop, alongside our exoskeleton, a free and autonomous humanoid robot that relies on the same technology,” he added.The research paper for HumanoidExo was published last week.
Exoskeleton Humanoid Robot Humanoids Lidar Sensors Robot Robotics
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