South Korea’s ROBOTIS just introduced its new open-source humanoid robot to rival Unitree’s G1.
The robotics firm is known for its high-power actuators and robotics kits for STEM. Its components are used by organizations like Disney Imagineering (to power the new Olaf AI robot), MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and militaries. They power everything from facia animatronics to military robots.
The Seoul-based company says its new humanoid platform, called AI Sapiens, stands about 1.3 meters (4 feet 3 inches) and weighs 34 kg (75 lbs). It boasts a reported 23 degrees of freedom (DoF). Each joint is powered by the company’s advanced Dynamixel Q actuators.
Its technical specs are similar on paper to the Chinese company Unitree’s G1, which has soared in popularity among researchers and developers thanks to its relatively low starting. However, AI Sapiens is fully open sourced, while only higher end G1 configurations offer the same level of customizability.
The robot’s onboard artificial intelligence runs on an 8-core ARM processor, with a Mali GPU and a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU). Its battery lasts for about an hour or two per charge.
According to ROBOTIS, the K0 is trained with a mix of imitation and reinforcement learning. Digital twins of the robot practice moves in simulation before they’re applied to the hardware via a process called Sim2Real, short for Simulation to Reality.
ROBOTIS, launched in 1999, has not confirmed a release date or pricing, but early reports suggest it could be between $8,000 and $12,000.