The fastest boxing robot in history! The lowest delay of a punch is 12 milliseconds!

Have you ever thought about humans and AI fighting in the ring through robots ?

In the final battle of the movie "Real Steel," two giant robots fight to the death in a boxing ring. Surprisingly, one of the robots is controlled by a human, who leaps into the air and punches, and the robot "bangs," mimics his movements perfectly with almost zero delay, and quickly throws a heavy punch at the other robot.

Now, this scene has been reproduced by Shandong Qibo Robotics Company. Once the demonstration video was released, countless netizens were stunned and exclaimed "The movie shines into reality!" At present, the video has accumulated 600,000 views and 32,000 likes on Bilibili. For a company with a narrow audience, this data is already a good report card and can be ranked among the "small hot gate" of science and technology.

This remote-controlled robot that can imitate real human combat movements and perform rapid strikes is called QIBBOT. Surprisingly, such a cool robot is made in China, and the R&D team, including consultants, consists of only three people. Not only is the team small, but the development funds are all paid out of pocket, purely for love.

The birth of the QIBBOT robot was inspired by the robot boxing match in the movie "Real Steel". Researchers said that large real robots would be a very novel experience for players, which is significantly different from virtual video games. Therefore, driven by the need for entertainment, they decided to develop a boxing robot similar to the one in the movie.

12 milliseconds latency enables real-time replication of human movements

As a ring robot, speed is the primary consideration for QIBBOT. It achieves an amazing 12 millisecond system delay, which means that QIBBOT can replicate the actions of human players in near real time, and its fast response gives it an absolute speed advantage in the "ring". In addition, humans also "hold back" its speed. With AI control, QIBBOT can reach a faster speed.

Remote-controlled robots before QIBBOT were often very small and could only move at slow or medium speeds. The system delay was often over 100 milliseconds. Achieving ultra-low latency of 12 milliseconds is undoubtedly a huge technical challenge. There are many factors that affect the speed of remote-controlled robots, including communication, interfaces, drives, transmissions, controllers, and algorithms. The QIBBOT team focused on breaking through the limitations of both mechanics and control through kinematic modeling and predictive control algorithms.

In terms of mechanical design, they used precise dynamic models to optimize the robot's mass distribution and joint structure; in terms of control, they added a predictive controller that can predict human movements in advance and offset some of the delay. Through continuous exploration and optimization, QIBBOT has become so popular that people can still hardly see the time difference with human movements even after slowing down the video several times.

The new version of QIBBOT will be released at the end of this year with more powerful functions

The QIBBOT team introduced that what everyone has seen so far is just a prototype used to verify the core technology, which has some shortcomings: accuracy is temporarily sacrificed in order to achieve rapid response. Although accuracy may not be so important in combat scenarios, if you want this technology to be truly implemented, have more application scenarios, and achieve commercialization and industrialization, then accuracy will be an indispensable and important part.

The next generation of QIBBOT is planned to be released before the end of this year, and will be greatly improved in both function and performance. The new version of QIBBOT will adopt a double-arm design, and the number of arm joints will also increase, which will make its movements smoother; at the same time, the trunk rotation ability will be increased, and different parts can move in coordination, making the movement pattern closer to humans and the strikes more explosive. In addition, better strike strategies and movement planning will give QIBBOT the strength of a true "martial artist".

Undoubtedly, QIBBOT's amazing response speed represents a major breakthrough in remote-controlled robot technology. Although this Chinese team has little funding, it has big ambitions and hopes to "win a place for our country at the top of the world's robotics technology." Can they create another impressive robot in the future?

Let's wait and see.