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.
At the sprawling facility in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, up to 100 robots spend hours each day observing and mimicking humans. Next is a convenience store, then a factory line followed by various other scenes from working life. (Until now foreign journalists have not been allowed to visit these centres.) 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. JD.com, an e-commerce company, said earlier this year that it has launched a project to pay 100,000 of its staff and 500,000 others to track their own movements.
The best form of these is “real machine” data, which are generated by the actions of a robot, either when it is controlled remotely or when it is carrying out tasks by itself. Known as “egocentric” data, this information is gathered by equipping a human with a headset and haptic-sensor gloves that record a person’s movements. 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.
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. Humanoids are currently fed a hotchpotch of data, often from low-quality simulations. Data collected from the real world are far more useful—and now highly sought after. Another important source comes from recording humans as they complete tasks. China is quickly becoming the frontrunner in the quest for real machine data, thanks to training centres such as the Hubei Humanoid Innovation Centre. At one of the dozens of work stations in the centre, a young man behind a counter is moving his hand, gloved in digital sensors, in a circular motion as if he were pouring hot water over coffee. Next to him stands a robot that is mimicking his motion but spouting real water from a kettle over a funnel of coffee. The manner in which the bot’s wrist and fingers move are creepily human. A few steps from the makeshift café is what looks like a pharmacy, where another human-robot duo are stocking shelves. 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. At the same time Chinese robot-makers are finding ways of collecting egocentric data from the country’s large manufacturing workforce—as well as its many unemployed youngsters. A cottage industry has emerged of vendors making wearable gear for that purpose. Some hope young people will wear the kit while at home as a part-time job. At a facility in Jiangsu, another coastal province, which has reportedly received state funding, the company pays people to slowly carry out tasks in fake grocery stores and other environments. Over the next two years it intends to gather 10m hours of data capturing real-world human scenarios. 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.
