Humanoid Robots Can Outrun Usain Bolt, But Complex Tasks Are Taking Longer - The Daily Upside

Generalist last month showed off a bot (basically two arms with pincers) trained on its GEN-1.5 AI model that could learn simple tasks like stacking cups or folding paper by watching short video demos. Not long after, Skild posted a video of its similar-looking robot learning via demo to flip pancakes. Figure’s progress update in May showed more commercial utility: Its humanoid team sorted through 250,000 packages. The co-founder of Spirit AI, a Chinese startup whose wheeled robots have started rolling around battery-maker CATL’s facilities, expects robots could be put to work in commercial settings within a year or two. ## The Gears Are Turning

Humanoid robots have basic movements down: They can get around and, as recently shown at China’s games, dominate sports. But for robots, beating Usain Bolt in a race is in many ways easier than folding laundry or working a factory line. They’re starting to show progress with those tasks, however, which require complex hand movements and a brain that comprehends what they’re doing (instead of blindly sprinting forward until they crash into a wall, like robots did at the Humanoid Games). Recent advancements have led analysts including Citrini to raise their expectations: Optimus Price: Once humanoid robots can handle the tasks that make them useful, they face another barrier to going mainstream: They’re expensive. JPMorgan recently estimated that robots ready to speed up the supply chain will cost about $120,000 each. Elon Musk set a distant price target of between $20,000 and $30,000 for Tesla’s Optimus bots, but Chinese startups, most notably XPeng, could beat Musk to the punch.

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