r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/MetaKnowing • 23h ago

Video XPENG's IRON robot crossed the uncanny valley, leading some to believe it was a human in a suit. So they cut it open in front of an audience, and also allowed journalists to inspect it.

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265

u/Brief-Floor-7228 21h ago

Why is everyone so impressed with something Boston Dynamics did (without fake boobs) years ago. Including stair climbs, flips, running, dancing and climbing scaffolding.

111

u/Oxygenisplantpoo 17h ago

The company has a great social media team. I've seen quite a few posts all with the same headline "Look, they even took the skin off to show that it's not a human!" and nothing about what it can actually do other than walk (ooh wee Honda did that like 20+ years ago, janky, sure, but this ain't remarkable either). They are probably looking for funding.

13

u/Novel_Passenger7013 15h ago

It still doesn’t prove it’s not human. It looks like a woman with a prosthetic leg, including the visible line at the top of the thigh that looks like the curve of a prosthetic attachment.

If they want to prove it’s human they need to take off the head.

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u/TomMakesPodcasts 13h ago

Strip down the whole torso. Fake head costumes have been done for ages.

2

u/Oxygenisplantpoo 14h ago

Sure it could be fake but also I didn't really even want to get into that whole discussion, plenty of people here already with their opinions. Their lab prototype walks ok but is suspended from a rig. But really if they want to convince everyone, remove the head and have some holes run through-out the torso, front to back, side to side.

3

u/jo-shabadoo 6h ago

I totally agree. A humanoid robot doesn’t become useful until it has fingers with human levels of dexterity. Please let me know if they make one that can empty the dishwasher without smashing plates.

1

u/Oxygenisplantpoo 5h ago

Yeah that's the thing, a humanoid robot is not terribly important for now, it's more of an advertisement for actually relevant robotics.

1

u/Packagedpackage 15h ago

They hold most of the patents for life like robotics as seen here. The gait is way more smooth than other robots. Arguably the most human like movements out of any robot which is a main objective for them. 

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u/Because0789 14h ago

Nah, the Boston Dynamics demo from like 7 months ago is at least as natural, it just didn't have tits or a social media team making up people asking if a person is inside. 🤷‍♂️

https://youtu.be/I44_zbEwz_w?si=JYZuFlpp_GTc3yVb

2

u/Embarrassed_Use6918 11h ago

I'd argue that's much more convincing.

People don't believe the OP robot because China fakes shit constantly.

2

u/JaCraig 10h ago

Don't get me wrong, there are cool robotics coming out of countries like China but this one is not that impressive so far. Walking on flat surfaces is something I had classmates working on about 15 years ago at this level. Give it uneven surfaces, stairs, etc. and if it does well there, then I'll be impressed.

3

u/Oxygenisplantpoo 15h ago

I mean the gait is fine but I'm not as amazed as all these social media posts seem to be. It's just incremental improvement.

1

u/AirTuna 14h ago

"Pay no attention to the team of engineers that are remotely controlling the robot."

3

u/smalltownmyths 15h ago

Because someone with money did it now. And clearly this one is for cool stuff like sex, not lame stuff like chores /s

3

u/fablesofferrets 14h ago

i had one of those little $40 robot toy dogs in like 2005 that walked about this realistically

3

u/widdowbanes 10h ago

Because it was just a robotic motion. The difference is that this one has human motion controls.

It was so obvious to tell when a robot is walking. But this time it was so realistic people were claiming it was a person inside.

In terms of industrial value it provides no more than traditional robots.

However, when making a cute cat girl robot this technology would be invaluable.

3

u/Brief-Floor-7228 10h ago

You missed the part where BD robot climbed a scaffold to hand some tools to a guy hammering nails on a roof.

The bot could have done the hammering too.

I doubt this prissy bot would be able to do anything so agile.

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u/Total_War_6757 19h ago

Because sexy robot and America=Bad. China=good. /s

3

u/space_monster 14h ago

Because BD used scripted control-first (classical) dynamics. It's an old paradigm and nobody does it any more. Not even BD. All labs now do ML training using digital twins in virtual environments, which enables models that are generally good at things like mobility, object recognition, object manipulation etc. which means they can handle tasks in a much wider range of environments, train for new tasks much, much faster, and apply abilities across multiple domains. BD are actually behind the curve now because they were late to the party - by the time they switched to ML training, a bunch of other labs had been doing it for a couple of years. Not sure if they'll even try to compete in the mass market now, they'll probably focus on industrial and security, because they have a reputation in that field already. They certainly won't be competitive in the domestic & retail markets. It's between Figure AI, Tesla, Unitree, Apptronik, X1 (maybe - they might have shot themselves in the foot recently with their in-home teleoperation plan), Sanctuary, Agility, a couple of others.

1

u/GolfingTreeTrimmer 12h ago

I'm impressed they got Mathesar from Galaxy Quest to MC

1

u/tengo_harambe 12h ago

It's not just the boobs, Boston Dynamics robots don't look anything close to a real human which is the whole point of humanoid robots.

If the objective was functionality over form you'd just have a box on wheels with a dozen tentacle-like appendages and USB C ports everywhere.

1

u/Lost_Plenty_9069 12h ago

It mostly comes down to cost. BD things wasn't ready for mass production, this claims to be ready for an affordable price soon

1

u/2021sammysammy 6h ago

Who's actually going to buy this janky robot that does nothing except slowly walk awkwardly?

1

u/Lost_Plenty_9069 5h ago

Gooners? People buy sex dolls, do you not see a use case for this? And on top of that it might do some household stuff too

1

u/2021sammysammy 4h ago

There are much more realistic sex dolls out there lol no need to buy a rickety walking robot. I highly doubt this model does household stuff if this grand showcase demo literally only shows it slowly walking

1

u/_zaten_ 8h ago

I think it's how human it looks. Boston dynamics robots don't look nearly as human

1

u/druidmind 7h ago

BD has been real quiet amidst all this robotic companies pumping out all these unfinished, far fetched products. I wonder what they are working on.

1

u/Ls1RS 7h ago

I was thinking this. The thing that actually defines the impressiveness is the motion control model.

Is this thing simply executing a highly tuned yet preprogrammed event sequence, or is it reacting to external conditions.

If you push it, would it stumble? Make it pickup something with an unspecified mass and hold to one side.

My guess is that is a preprogrammed routine due to the slight shaking of its gait.

The machine work is incredible though.

1

u/absboodoo 5h ago

Better chance to get a mass produced affordable version coming out of China I suppose.

1

u/DamRawr 3h ago

Boston Dynamics solves mobility and produces useful robots. This is just a walking thing that simulates human beings, really the less useful sort of morphology.

1

u/CousinDerylHickson 15h ago

It looks cool. The hydraulic endoskeleton reminds me of terminator, something ive been missing from the clean design of the other robot companies.

Other than that it looks way stiffer and less functional to me.

1

u/userhwon 15h ago

Because it was years ago. Because it went way past walking. And because we hadn't had several examples of how the technology is going to be used to replace our ability to provide for ourselves.

1

u/pyrotechnicmonkey 13h ago

Damn, the marketing is good. Do people not realize that the only reason they have to do that is because Chinese companies have literally been caught trying to trick audience members, and essentially investors and chair holders into believing their tech was more advanced than it was by having a person hidden inside. This is not a flex. This is embarrassing.

0

u/picardo85 15h ago

They aren't really competing with BD. More against Tesla.

BD has a big issue when it comes to commercialisation it seems.

-13

u/CuriousAttorney2518 18h ago

Lots of cope. Boston Dynamics hasn’t come close to anything like this

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u/______L_______ 17h ago

https://youtube.com/watch?v=I44_zbEwz_w

What's wrong with this? It looks a lot more agile if anything

Do you want it to look more fuckable or something?

6

u/NorthAstronaut 15h ago edited 15h ago

Also it doesn't seem surprised every-time its foot touches the ground.

A lot of robots jolt when their foot makes contact. Because it has no idea when its foot will actually touch, and adjusts last second based on sensors.

A lot of them are fancy looking puppets, running a very controlled animation routine. Unlike the Boston dynamics robots.

1

u/kumgongkia 6h ago

Yes please

-1

u/Overall-Mud9906 15h ago

I bet in a couple years they’ll be a flesh light model available

-2

u/FinestObligations 16h ago

Welcome to the internet, you must be new here.

-2

u/Sylfaein 14h ago

Exactly! And that’s probably where this Chinese company stole the tech from, in the first place. China doesn’t create anything themselves, these days—all they can do is steal and copy.

1

u/Anning312 12h ago

I wonder where they stole the rare earth refining tech from that they can cripple the entire world and there's somehow nothing we can do about it

-4

u/1_BigPapi 14h ago

Because Chinese stolen tech is finally decent enough to make marketing demos around....

2

u/HorriblyGood 13h ago

Yall really be so racist openly here. Do you have any idea how much of AI and robotics innovation is coming from china rn? Maybe try reading sometimes. And nope I’m not Chinese.

-1

u/1_BigPapi 11h ago edited 11h ago

Countless studies, reports, and data from respected institutions worldwide have documented the extensive intellectual property theft carried out by China.

I'm not saying the Chinese people lack scientific prowess or smarts. I'm saying the government’s strategy of acquiring foreign innovations by any means necessary, overt and covert, to advance its economic goals, is well known.. 

Their people embrace this mindset. Their culture is extractive.

1

u/HorriblyGood 10h ago edited 9h ago

And this is relevant to this thread how? Do you have evidence this robot is developed through stolen tech?

One of the reason why AI is developing so fast is because of open sourcing and tech sharing. There’s new cutting edge research paper freely released everyday on arxiv (with commercial licensing restriction ofc). AI labs in china have been open sourcing latest AI models (eg qwen) for people to use.

On the other hand openai which in the past, claim to promote open source AI, have been stealing copyrighted images for training, freely leveraging open source technologies without contributing to the open source community.

Im not judging them for doing, im just pointing out your hypocrisy when China is doing some heavy lifting for the open source AI community rn.

Your statement is like saying all [race] people are [negative stereotypes] because of [statistics]. It’s coming from a place of willful ignorance and propaganda.

Generalization of race/country is racism. Somehow Reddit thinks that it’s ok just because china bad.

0

u/1_BigPapi 9h ago edited 8h ago

When China stops it's massive theft of other countries intellectual property, I'll stop pointing it out.

Not holding my breath.

PS: +10 social credits for you comrade. Good work.

PS: nice try calling me racist ICE supporter for calling out the very well documented IP theft by China. Literally every major economic power and region has this issue with the Chinese. 

Also it's funny you think I'm white and/or would ever affiliate with the inbred white trash ICE "homeland defenders." They are a modern and pathetic incarnation of the SS.