Going by the company’s 2025 of making helpful humanoid robots affordable for people, CloudMinds means business. The robotic and cloud AI operator announced the launch of its cloud AI based robot, the XR-1.
The firm announced about the robot in Mobile World Congress of this year in Barcelona whose focus is on IoT, AI, mobile communications and 5G applications.
The XR-1 robot is their first commercial humanoid robot. The XR-1 is the first ever humanoid cloud robot that has a vision-guided precision with grasping and manipulation capabilities.
Representing a new type of technology development and looking to commercialize it, the XR-1 comes as a highly intelligent robot.
CloudMinds has used two ground-breaking technologies to come up with it. The Smart Compliant Actuator (SCA) and the Human Augmented Robotics Intelligence paired with extreme Reality (HARIX.
5G Connection and Cloud AI Powered
If the network is anything to go by, the robot has a secure connection of mobile network that’s powered by HARIX. This is a combination of human augmentation and artificial intelligence.
There is the massive multiplayer online (MMO) which the XR-1 integrates multimedia data streaming which connects millions of cloud robots with each performing a set of different service tasks.
Being the first generation of such Cloud AI-powered robots, the robot is set to utilize its AI engines, scalability and learning capabilities to produce high-level intelligence. Even as it does this, it will be providing low battery consumption and low cost for the robot body.
A look at the Smart Compliant Micro Servo Technology (SCA)
This particular technology solves issues such as joint control and issues related to safety compliance as it helps the service robots work close to humans.
SCA is a technology that is highly integrated and has safe and flexible manipulation capabilities. It combines the components of traditional decelerators, encoders, servo motors, and drives.
As part of a demonstration at the MWC event at Booth 7A60, the XR-1 robot served beverages to guests showing off its flexible arms built of compliant joints. Compliant joints can detect resistance force and stop all actions until the resistance is gone.
During the showcase, the XR-1 used a multimodal sensing subsystem to help understand the required tasks and surroundings. The SCA through the smart joints sensed the force by humans and operated smoothly without a hitch.
The robot performs its tasks through its 3D vision sensing system with a combination of the HARIX platform’s 3D object recognition together with other algorithms to support closed-loop visual feedback. These advanced technologies are what collectively help the XR-1 to perform the tasks efficiently even in the presence of humans and other machines.
Another precise demonstration is when the robot guided a thread through a needle hole effortlessly and repeatedly. Unbelievably, this was made possible by controlling 14 SCAs which would typically be a hard precision level for compliant actuators to achieve.
For lovers of humor, the robot is humorous, and it understands users’ intents and takes the proper actions. All this is made possible through a cloud-based language processing system.
If you thought the robot only told jokes you are wrong. The robot can bust some moves too! The robot danced to a wide range of songs from soft melodies to some heart-pumping rhythms smoothly just like humans. This was even easier due to the robot’s slender body and long arms that left the audience awe-stricken.
For a robot to move smoothly like a human, it needs high-quality compliant joints. Most companies have been doing their research in labs without commercializing the robots which has been costly.
For startups, financing is usually a huge obstacle to the growth of the business even in research companies. It may get to a point where as the company owner you get to debt until you have debt collection agencies such as ARS National collections calling you. For CloudMinds, they have been able to come up with a way of making the whole development cost effective.
CloudMinds has managed to overcome the cost barrier by developing the compliant actuator, SCA. Each SCA has some embedded chips paired with multimodal sensors that support control algorithms to make the robot motion compliant making the robot have human-like motion.
With SCA, the company has been able to couple high performance and low cost. The company is set to start mass production of the SCA to provide people with the unique features not forgetting the cost saving aspect.
The CEO, Bill Huang said that based on the advanced technologies put in place, CloudMinds is set to develop compliant service robots. The robots will range from wheeled to two-legged. The firm will be leveraging on the 5G network which has a high bandwidth and low latency. The firm intends to grow gradually, and people can watch out for more in the future.
