Beijing E-Town Unveils Humanoid Robots and Complete Industry Chain
After achieving the world’s first humanoid running with a full-sized pure electric humanoid robot, “Tiangong” has demonstrated new skills. Walker S Lite has started its training in automotive smart factories, and the world’s first orthopedic surgical robot equipped with AI deep learning technology has been unveiled. Soft robots have also broken through industrial application bottlenecks. World Robot Conference opened in Beijing E-Town (Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area), showcasing over ten innovative products from Beijing E-Town at the 2024 World Robot Expo, with humanoid robots taking center stage. Through “Robot Mobilization,” Beijing E-Town has developed internationally leading humanoid robots, AI medical robots, and autonomously controlled key components, transforming these advancements into new productivity and continuously enhancing the innovation capability of the robot industry.
Dancing, bowing, greeting, grabbing objects by sound… when the nation’s first general-purpose humanoid robot platform “Tiangong” demonstrated these new skills, it once again caught attention. The last sensation was in April this year, when “Tiangong,” independently developed by the Beijing Embodied Intelligence Robot Innovation Center, achieved the world’s first humanoid running at a stable speed of 6 km/h with a full-sized pure electric humanoid robot. Four months later, “Tiangong” has been upgraded again, using a predictive reinforcement imitation learning method based on state memory, mastering more varied movements and speech-interactive grabbing capabilities under the support of a large embodied intelligence model. “When a person gives a voice command, the embodied intelligent robot can complete a set of grab-and-release actions based on the ‘open vocabulary object detection and arbitrary object segmentation multimodal model.’ We have now connected the embodied intelligence model pipeline, meaning robots can understand human commands, break down tasks, and complete them. In the future, robots will be able to help humans with more tasks,” explained Zhang Qiang, a humanoid robot algorithm expert at the Innovation Center. “We are committed to the development of key technologies and ecosystem construction for embodied intelligent robots. Currently, we are based in Beijing E-Town, and through the ‘Tiangong’ and ‘Kaiwu’ projects, we aim to promote technological innovation and industrial development, leading the industry in solving common problems.”
“We are launching two new products,” said a representative from the “Little Giant” enterprise, Tsino-Dynatron. “Among them, targeting the development trend of humanoid robots, we have independently developed the CoolDrive Mini ANT networked micro servo drive, which features high power density, high switching frequency, high bandwidth response, and low loss, suitable for applications requiring compact size and high bursts, such as humanoid robots and mechanical dogs.” Lingzu Times, established in Beijing E-Town just over eight months ago, has broken through the innovation bottleneck between lightness and stability in robot joints. Founder and COO Shao Yuanxin said, “Robot joints are the key to making humanoid robots as flexible as humans. Our self-developed Robstride04, a 120N.m integrated joint module, can drive medium-sized bipedal humanoid robots or full-sized quadruped robots.” The robotic arm used a “blue claw” to steadily grab and move a pot of tea, while soft robots demonstrated the secrets of “soft fingers” in industrial applications through an intelligent interactive robot tea art demonstration platform. The company’s self-developed flexible gripper can handle nearly 96% of irregular and fragile objects in industrial production, a level of technical complexity that only two companies globally have mastered.
In addition to significant breakthroughs in key technology development, more robots in Beijing E-Town have transformed into new productivity. UBTECH, which established its humanoid robot headquarters in Beijing E-Town this year, showcased its “humanoid robot troupe,” including Walker S and Walker S Lite, and demonstrated industrial humanoid robot solutions on-site. Haobao Yu, Vice President of UBTECH Robotics and Chairman of Beijing UBTECH Intelligent Robotics Co., Ltd., explained, “Combining end-to-end imitation learning, precise visual recognition, and fine full-body motion control technologies, the industrial version of the humanoid robot Walker S Lite has already ‘joined’ several automotive factories, such as collaborating with employees at the CTU inbound loading station in the Zeekr factory to perform handling tasks. It is the first humanoid robot in China to perform the entire process of material box handling tasks, both in execution and public display, with its operational completion and execution difficulty among the top in the industry.”
