Elephant Robotics launches the first 10,000-yuan Mercury humanoid robot series-EEWORLD

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The 14th Five-Year Industrial Development Plan points out that the research and development, manufacturing, and application of robots are important indicators of a country's scientific and technological innovation and high-end manufacturing level. At present, the booming robot industry is greatly changing human production and lifestyle, and injecting strong momentum into economic and social development.

As an important part of the robotics industry, humanoid robots have unique technologies and functions and are widely used in education, scientific research, services, entertainment and other fields, bringing unprecedented convenience and efficiency.

In October 2023, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Guiding Opinions on the Innovation and Development of Humanoid Robots". The report pointed out that robotics technology already has a mature technical foundation. Led by technological breakthroughs such as large models, humanoid robot technology is evolving at an accelerated pace. It has become a new frontier for competition, a new track for future industries, and a new engine for economic development. It has great development potential and broad application prospects.

In line with Elephant Robotics' layout and development path, the Mercury humanoid robot product series with a price tag of tens of thousands of yuan was officially released.

There are three products in the Mercury robot series: Mercury A1 seven-axis collaborative arm, Mercury B1 semi-humanoid dual-arm robot, and Mercury X1 general-purpose wheeled humanoid robot.

The industrial designs of the three products are all carefully designed by a Swedish team, integrating seven major robot cores and multiple usage and development methods, aiming to meet the needs of five major application scenarios including education, scientific research, service, entertainment and remote control operation.

Mercury Robotics Product Family

Mercury A1 - 7-axis collaborative robot

Mercury A1 is a lightweight 7-DOF collaborative robot driven by 7 Elephant Robotics self-developed harmonic modules. The new 7-axis industrial design was carefully designed by a Swedish team. The whole machine uses an ultra-light carbon fiber shell, which reduces weight while greatly improving the strength and rigidity of the whole machine.

Mercury A1 adopts a single master control and dual slave control mode. The master control adopts Cortext A72 - 1.Hz, equipped with a 2.0-inch IPS-LCD touch screen, and cooperates with the robot convenient development myPanel OS independently developed by Elephant Robotics, which can realize the rapid deployment of applications without the need for automation.

Mercury B1 - Dual 7-axis semi-humanoid robot

The Mercury B1 dual-arm semi-humanoid robot has a total of 17 degrees of freedom and is equipped with two A1 seven-axis robotic arms, which can independently operate one arm and coordinate two arms. The head is equipped with a 9-inch high-definition LCD touch screen, which supports multi-point control and user-customized expression display. It is controlled by the NVIDIA Xavier master control and four independent sub-controllers. With the integrated 3D camera, it can complete 2D/3D guidance, grasping and VR remote control.

As the first robot adapted by ChatGPT fRobocs, Mercury B1 has a built-in high-definition microphone array and supports real-time voice collection, which will bring a new experience of voice recognition interaction.

Mercury X1 - Wheeled humanoid robot

Mercury X1 wheeled humanoid robot has 19 degrees of freedom, composed of Mercury B1 and high-performance mobile base. The whole machine is equipped with Jetson Xavier and Jetson Nano dual main controllers, four independent sub-controllers for the upper body, and one independent sub-controller for the lower body for matching control. The mobile base is equipped with high-performance laser radar, ultrasound and 2D vision and other rich perceptions; it adopts direct drive, with a maximum operating speed of 1.2m/s; the maximum climbing height is 2CM; the maximum climbing angle is 15 degrees. The maximum battery life of the whole machine is up to 8 hours, which meets the needs of personal and commercial applications.

Liyuan series harmonic modules, high torque and light weight, the new self-developed modules output powerful power

All Mercury Robot products are equipped with Elephant Robot's new self-developed power source series harmonic modules. The new modular design module is equipped with electromagnetic brakes and hollow wiring. It has the characteristics of high inertia and low weight.

The maximum output torque can reach 80Nm, with the highest optional multi-turn 12-bit, and the repeatability accuracy is up to 0.6 arc minutes. The aluminum alloy and carbon fiber materials used in the entire housing of the robotic arm further reduce the weight of the entire machine and optimize the power performance.

Powerful computing power empowers a new frontier of embodied intelligence

Mercury humanoid robots B1 and X1 use the new NVIDIA Jetson Xavier edge computing core as the main control module. With an AI performance of up to 21TOPS, these modules provide powerful computing power for processing visual ranging, sensor fusion, positioning and map construction, obstacle and path planning algorithms, creating unlimited possibilities for the development and application of embodied intelligence.

In particular, in the process of overcoming the technical difficulties of VR teleoperation, ensuring low-latency streaming is one of the key challenges. Elephant Robotics adopted an innovative solution, namely, by using the celerad GStreamer plug-in provided by the NVIDIA Xavier platform, it successfully achieved accelerated video encoding and decoding, while ensuring real-time performance, optimizing bandwidth utilization to the greatest extent, and providing hardware acceleration for VR teleoperation.

Seven integrated algorithms to create machine intelligence

The Mercury robot series products integrate seven intelligent algorithms for the first time, which improve the overall kinematic and dynamic performance of the robotic arm, suppress vibration, and ensure smooth coordination of the two arms. They are deeply integrated with visual, laser and voice sensors to create three-dimensional machine intelligence in all aspects with the support of artificial intelligence.

Mercury seven-axis robotic arm control

The kinematic algorithm can realize corresponding trajectories such as straight lines, arcs, splines, etc. The seven-axis robot arm is also called a redundant robot arm. It has a redundant structure similar to that of a human hand, which can maintain the end posture unchanged. Only by modifying the redundant arm angle can zero-space motion be achieved. The existence of redundant arm angles allows the robot to move to adjacent continuous positions without making large-scale posture rotations, and has a unique advantage in small-range rotational motion. The Mercury robot series also has functions that have been realized in other Elephant Robot product lines, such as drag teaching, soft floating of the robot arm, collision detection, and speed fusion.

Double arm coordination

Inspired by the human ability to work with both hands, myBlockly integrates a dual-arm synchronization and coordination algorithm to achieve dual-arm coordination, making the robot more flexible and efficient in complex and precise tasks. It also has conventional algorithms such as dual-arm self-interference detection, synchronization, and coordination.

SLAM laser navigation

Using advanced RTABMAP 3D and 2D SLAM navigation technology, Mercury uses laser radar to perceive the plane environment, uses 3D cameras to build maps in real time and locate at the same time, and achieves intelligent navigation and obstacle avoidance, with efficient and accurate movement capabilities.

Monocular Vision

With the help of advanced visual algorithms and OpenCV-based technology, the Mercury robot arm has realized multiple intelligent recognition functions. Multiple recognition methods such as color, shape, Aruco markers, feature points and YOLO target detection enable the robot arm to respond to various tasks quickly and accurately.

Whether it is color recognition, shape positioning, or quickly capturing specific markers, the Mercury robotic arm has demonstrated excellent flexibility and efficiency. In a complex and ever-changing working environment, it can complete tasks in an intelligent way and is a powerful assistant in the work scene.

Binocular Vision

Mercury robot introduces advanced indoor 3D visual reconstruction technology, which can accurately capture the indoor environment through lidar and camera. With the help of feature extraction and depth estimation, it generates accurate 3D maps in real time, providing strong support for intelligent navigation and environmental understanding.

myBlockly combines speech recognition and GPT models to convert users' voice commands into Blockly code. Users can generate complex Blockly code with simple verbal commands without manual input, which greatly improves programming efficiency.

ChatGPT Fusion

myBlockly integrates ChatGPT and implements AI programming through natural language interaction with ChatGPT. Users do not need to understand programming languages, they only need to describe the functions of the program to generate Blockly blocks with one click, and easily build complex programs.

Three integrated software operation modes, brand new self-developed operation software! Redefine human-computer interaction

Unleash the power of Mercury effortlessly

The Mercury A1 robotic arm’s built-in “myPanel” is equipped with a two-inch touch screen, which enables quick teaching and programming of the robotic arm and can be debugged and deployed without any additional equipment.