Baidu and UBTech Collaborate on Humanoid Robot “Walker S” with AI Large Model
On April 1st, it was announced that UBTech has recently partnered with Baidu to integrate the humanoid robot Walker S with the Wenxin large model, enhancing its embodied artificial intelligence capabilities. This collaboration aims to explore the application of large-scale AI models in humanoid robots, accelerate the development of new high-quality productivity, and inject new momentum into the industries of artificial intelligence and humanoid robots.
“Walker, I will be going on a business trip tomorrow. Can you help me fold the clothes in your hands?” “Of course.” With a voice command, the Walker S humanoid robot starts manipulating soft objects (folding clothes) on the table. Although not very fast, each movement is methodical. According to UBTech’s latest video on “AI + humanoid robots,” Walker S has made new advancements in embodied intelligent applications. By integrating with the Wenxin large model, Walker S has gained advanced intent comprehension and fine-grained planning capabilities on top of its existing multimodal perception and motion control abilities.
From the video, it can be seen that Walker S, enhanced with the AI large model, has made progress in semantic understanding, interaction, and intelligent task management. Walker S can act as a “fashion consultant,” providing outfit suggestions to people, and also as an “organizer,” neatly sorting scattered items on the table back into boxes. Even when intentionally disrupted, Walker S can intelligently adapt and rearrange items, with real-time updated path planning.
How does Walker S ensure the accuracy and efficiency of its sorting results? Reportedly, during the sorting process, Walker leverages Baidu’s Intelligent Cloud Qianfan large model platform to use Wenxin Yiyan for task decomposition and reasoning, along with visual language models to ensure precise detection, positioning, general grasping, and anomaly handling, ensuring smooth task execution even under disturbances.
UBTech states that humanoid robots are the best carriers of embodied intelligence. Through the Baidu Intelligent Cloud Qianfan AppBuilder platform, the UBTech humanoid robot Walker S has connected with the Baidu Wenxin large model for task scheduling application development, rapidly enhancing its task planning and execution capabilities. For instance, to ensure the accuracy and efficiency of sorting results, during the sorting process, leveraging Baidu’s Intelligent Cloud Qianfan large model platform for task decomposition and reasoning using Wenxin Yiyan, combined with on-device multimodal perception models for precise recognition, localization, general grasping, and anomaly processing, ensuring that Walker S can successfully carry out sorting tasks even under disturbances.
In the past two years, the explosion of the AI industry, large models, and humanoid robots has become a significant driving force for global technological development. The innovative application and technical complexity of UBTech’s humanoid robot Walker S collaborating with Baidu’s Wenxin large model place them at the forefront globally within their industry.
Baidu is a pioneer in domestic large models, with its self-developed Wenxin industrial-grade knowledge enhancement large model possessing deep cross-modal, cross-language semantic understanding, and generation capabilities. In a recent evaluation of Chinese large model capabilities by Frost & Sullivan, Baidu’s Wenxin Yiyan ranked first in four out of five evaluation dimensions: mathematical and scientific capabilities, language proficiency, ethical responsibility, industry capabilities, and overall capabilities.
UBTech is one of the few companies globally with full-stack capabilities in humanoid robots, as well as one of the rare companies to mass-produce servo drives from small torque to large torque (ranging from 0.2Nm to 200Nm). Their independently developed humanoid robot Walker is China’s first commercially available bipedal life-size humanoid robot. According to a 2023 report by the People’s Daily Online Research Institute on “Patent Analysis of Humanoid Robot Technology,” UBTech ranks first globally in effective humanoid robot patents.
UBTech states that the combination of AI large models and humanoid robots not only significantly enhances the intelligence of humanoid robots but also boosts their capability to perform diverse tasks in various environments. With the empowerment of large model technology, the industrialization of humanoid robots will accelerate. In the future, cost-effective and efficient humanoid robots will find practical applications in industrial manufacturing, commercial services, and household assistance, addressing labor shortages, improving production efficiency, and enhancing human life. In the future, Baidu and UBTech will further explore cooperation in data sharing and model training optimization, digital twins and virtual reality, and expansion into cross-domain applications.