Xiaomi unveils CyberOne

Background

A humanoid robot is a machine built to move through the world in a body shaped like a person's: two arms, two legs, a torso and a head. Engineers keep returning to that shape because homes, offices, factories and stairwells are already built around human proportions and human hands, so a machine of similar size can in principle use the same doors, tools and workbenches as the people around it. The hard part is control. Every joint adds an independent variable that has to be coordinated with all the others, and the machine has to stay upright while it moves.

What was announced

On the evening of 11 August 2022, Xiaomi presented CyberOne, a full-size humanoid bionic robot, during Lei Jun's annual speech.^[1][2] It was a stage demonstration rather than a product launch: the robot appeared as part of the presentation.

The machine

According to Securities Times, the robot stands 1.77 metres tall and weighs 52 kg.^[2] The same report describes 21 degrees of freedom, with a response time of 0.5 milliseconds at each degree of freedom.^[1] A degree of freedom is one independent axis along which a joint can move; a shoulder that swings forward and back and also rotates has more than one. Twenty-one across a whole body is a fairly restrained number, and the restraint is a trade-off: fewer, simpler joints are easier to control and cheaper to build than a hand with dozens of motors. The 0.5-millisecond figure describes how quickly each joint answers a command, which matters for balance, because a robot that reacts slowly cannot correct a stumble.

Xiaomi's own description adds two details. The first is sensing: the company's page says the robot's depth accuracy reaches 1% within 8 metres.^[3] Depth accuracy is how precisely a machine can tell how far away something is, and it matters because a walking robot has to judge the distance to the floor, to furniture and to the people around it before deciding where to put a foot. The second is coordination: Xiaomi says a full-body control algorithm coordinates the 21 joint degrees of freedom.^[3] A full-body controller is the layer of software that turns an intention — stand, walk, turn, gesture — into a set of joint commands that keep the machine balanced. Without it each joint would act on its own, and the robot would fall.

On stage

Lei Jun interacted with the robot several times during the presentation.^[1] Live demonstrations are the usual way humanoid robots are introduced, because a machine that walks and responds in front of an audience shows at a glance what a specification sheet cannot.

Not yet a product

Securities Times reported that the robot had not yet entered mass production.^[2] That places it at the prototype stage: a machine that can be shown and operated, rather than one being manufactured in volume.

Market reaction

The announcement moved markets. Xiaomi shares and Chinese smart-machine concept stocks rose after the announcement, and more than ten stocks hit their daily limit on 12 August 2022.^[1] The size of that move says as much about investor expectations for robotics as about the machine itself: a stage demonstration was enough to reprice a whole cluster of listed companies connected to intelligent machines.

Why it matters

Humanoid robots are one of the oldest ambitions in robotics, and for a long time they lived in laboratories. Showing a full-size walking machine on the stage of an annual corporate speech is a way of claiming that the field has moved closer to industry. For a consumer-electronics company, it is also a statement about where it wants to be: the robot was presented next to the company's other work, as a long-term platform rather than a single gadget. The limits are equally clear. With the machine not yet in mass production, and with the published figures covering height, weight, joint count, response time, depth accuracy and control, the announcement described a direction rather than something a customer could buy. Whether such a machine becomes a product depends on problems the demonstration did not address: cost, battery life, reliability and what the robot would actually do all day.