On August 17th one of their number, called Superman, clocked up a running speed of 12.66 metres per second, beating the previous record set by Usain Bolt, before crashing into a wall. Their price leapt by 460%. China’s humanoid robots are sprinting ahead of their rivals—quite literally. The triumph only added to the buzz over Unitree, Superman’s maker, which debuted its shares in Shanghai two days later.
That would put them at a similar size to the large language models powering chatbots. The difference is that chatbots can be trained on the reams of digital text available on the internet. Gathering the data necessary to teach a robot to identify a glass, pick it up and fill it with coffee is much harder. It must understand everything from its spatial position to the brittleness of the glass and the viscosity of its contents. That information must be mined from experiences in the real world, or detailed recreations of those experiences. Most were created in the past two years. A small city in coastal Zhejiang province already has six training centres. For every eight hours of coffee-pouring, the droid at the café station produces just three hours of useful data. The rest is spoiled, mostly by errors that engineers do not want the robots to learn. China’s humanoid industry is unlike most other manufacturing businesses that have thrived in the country. Over the next few years it is set to produce and sell hundreds of thousands of costly but mostly useless machines in the hope that it can make cheaper and useful ones in the future. American competitors have been relying on less expensive training methods. Various companies have been using videos of human movement to train their humanoids. And since these days America has few factory workers who can be handed gear for egocentric collection, a number of firms are reportedly paying workers in poor countries, where wages are lower than in China, to don headsets and haptic gloves as they work.
The centre in Wuhan is one of 53 facilities in China built especially for gleaning the secrets of human movement, according to data from Interact Analysis, a consulting firm. Another 34 are under construction or planned. One being constructed in Shanghai will have space for 1,000 humanoids. Training centres require a large amount of space and many people to run them, as well as a legion of cutting-edge humanoids, which can run to 100,000 ($15,000) yuan apiece. This form of training costs 500-700 yuan per hour, reckons Corey Chan of HSBC, a bank.
100m training hours will be required to develop a robot that can perform a wide variety of daily tasks, according to one estimate. Tesla, America’s biggest producer of humanoids, is said to be training robots in its own warehouses, which saves constructing standalone training facilities.
