"New Shenzhener" Walker's Youth Training Manual

Author | Wang Jinwang

In 2020, the 40th anniversary of the establishment of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone ushered in a highlight moment.

At the “Dreaming and Advancing First—A Gala to Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Establishment of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone”, a large humanoid service robot left a deep impression on many viewers.

In fact, there was more than one humanoid robot appearing at the party. Leifeng.com noticed that at most, there were six humanoid robots and dancers performing on the stage at the same time, which was a very shocking scene.

Where did this robot come from?

In fact, the humanoid robot that appeared on the stage of this epoch-making celebration gala is also a native "new Shenzhener".

In January 2019, a 1.45-meter-tall "Internet celebrity" robot appeared at the CES in the United States. It could serve tea, walk upright, and even open the refrigerator door to pass drinks and potato chips to the audience.

This "Internet celebrity" robot is none other than Walker, a large humanoid service robot developed by UBTECH Robotics.

Walker hands out potato chips to the audience at CES

Among large humanoid service robots, Walker is a real top student. It is reported that Walker has 36 high-performance servo joints and has force perception, vision, hearing, and spatial perception systems and capabilities.

Take the action of handing potato chips to the audience as an example:

Walker uses the seven-degree-of-freedom robotic arms in conjunction with its own visual perception and force perception to pick up potato chips from the dining table;

Through U-SLAM visual navigation technology, more abundant information such as features, colors, depth, etc. in the external environment can be obtained, without the need to use markers in the environment to help Walker locate;

When walking towards the audience, when it is disturbed by external impact or inertia, Walker can adjust its body posture through the compliant control of its legs to maintain its balance. Even when the external disturbance is too large, Walker can still maintain balance by adjusting its gait and control algorithm.

Multimodal interaction capabilities such as facial recognition and voice interaction allow Walker to add a smile or a greeting after "feeding".

In fact, UBTECH Robotics had already started the internal project of developing Walker as early as 2015. After several iterations, the new generation of Walker was finally released in 2019 and attracted much attention on the international stage. Later, it even became a representative of China's humanoid robot technology strength, and was selected as one of the top five humanoid robots worth paying attention to in the world by the well-known American robot industry media "The Robot Report" along with Boston Dynamics' Atlas, Agility Robotics' Cassie, Toyota's T-HR3, and Honda's E2-DR.

Such a robot with outstanding capabilities underwent another professional "training" before appearing at the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone.

One minute on stage, ten years of hard work off stage.

This is true for ordinary people, and even more so for large humanoid robots at this stage.

In June, after receiving an invitation from the director team of Shenzhen's 40th Anniversary Gala, UBTECH Robotics quickly assembled a project team of more than 30 people to ensure that Walker could be presented as a technological element in this gala that the whole country was paying attention to to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone.

UBTECH Robotics Project Team

As we all know, large humanoid robots are still in the scientific research stage and face many technical challenges in all aspects. Even though Walker can walk freely, the complex lighting, roads, and fast-moving actors on the stage make the performance environment very complicated, not to mention the need to cooperate with dancers to complete the prescribed movements in such an environment.

These are exactly the problems that Walker's team of more than 30 people, consisting of staff from different fields such as motion control, navigation, vision, structure, electronics, ID, and interaction, has to solve in just a few months before the performance.

After the project team was formed, the first problem facing them was the precise positioning of the robot in the complex lighting and shadow environment of the stage.

The party was held at the Shenzhen Grand Theater. Unlike other stages, the stage used for this party was 50 meters deep. The stage was equipped with an LED screen of more than 1,000 square meters for playing dynamic videos, and dozens of sets of strong light effects to show the light and shadow effects. Such a light and shadow environment has become a major problem for traditional robots developed based on stable lighting environments in terms of visual positioning technology.

What is even more challenging is that when the robot leaves the scene, all the stage lights will be turned off, which requires the robot to walk off the stage in a nearly dark environment.

As an excellent student who has been deeply engaged in the field of robotics for many years, UBTECH Robotics Research Institute itself has the technical reserves of visual positioning - through the camera equipped by Walker itself, it recognizes the characteristics of the surrounding environment, establishes an environmental map, and thus infers its own precise location.

However, such a special environment makes it difficult for Walker's original positioning technology to meet special stage requirements.

Faced with this dilemma, after several investigations, the technical team discovered that the infrared light source in the stage lights is very weak, so infrared cameras have a good ability to resist light interference. Following this idea, the team added an infrared camera solution to Walker's original visual solution.

In order to achieve more accurate positioning on the stage, they also used multiple special markers that can be accurately identified by infrared cameras in strong external light or dark environments to assist in positioning.

Eventually you will find that when Walker appears on the stage of a party, he can walk to his desk smoothly without being disturbed by the stage lights and pour a drink for the children in the community.

In the future, Walker, which is going global from Shenzhen, will continue to demonstrate the technical strength of China's large-scale humanoid service robots as a pioneer demonstrator and realize the mission of "bringing intelligent robots into thousands of households."

related articles:

• Interpreting the logic behind UBTECH's new generation Walker opening the refrigerator to get drinks | CES 2019
  

• WAIC2020｜UBTECH Robotics' Zhou Jian: Intelligent robots are the new carrier of new infrastructure
  

• Exclusive interview with UBTECH CTO Xiong Youjun: What problems has UBTECH solved with the new generation of Walker?