Robot that learns boxing, playing piano by watching people

Researchers have developed a humanoid robot that can not only imitate actions performed by humans but also learn from them just by shadowing the movements.

Stanford University researchers have made a robot called ‘HumanPlus’. The team says that it can learn how to play the piano, return a ping-pong ball, and more by shadowing human actions.

The humanoid robot uses a single RGB camera and a whole-body policy for cloning human motion, according to Zipeng Fu, who is from the Stanford team.

Building and training HumanPlus

The researchers state that HumanPlus needs 40 hours of human movement data to learn a task and then carry it out step by step. Moreover, it can shadow humans using its camera and then reproduce the actions in real-time.

The humanoid has been built with Unitree’s H1 robot as a base with hands from Inspire-Robots and wrists from another company. The final specimen is five feet nine inches tall.

Another unique aspect of the robot is that its design is open source, which means its functionality can be changed as needed in the future.

The researchers have also released a GitHub repository that can be accessed by anyone wishing to build a similar model on their own. The data regarding the prices of the various parts used in HumanPlus has also been shared by the Stanford researchers.

It is not cheap to get a working model like HumanPlus, though, and as per the rough estimates shared by the team, they built the robot at a price of roughly $ 107,945.

However, considering the amount of movements it can copy and carry out it is likely going to be one of the cheaper options available in the market right now.

The era of humanoid robots

Humanoid robots are the rage these days, recently Tesla CEO Elon Musk had stated that his company is likely to have more than 1,000 humanoid robots working in its factories next year.

He had also said that Optimus robots, which are being built by him, could go on sale next year and make Tesla a $25 trillion company.

Musk has previously stated that he believes Optimus will be Tesla’s most important product. The company reportedly has two of the robots working autonomously in its main US factory. 

Moving on, a humanoid robot had also delivered a spring commencement speech at a college in New York. 

A popular artificial intelligence (AI) robot named Sophia spoke to over 2,000 attendees, including graduates, faculty members, and families, at the function organized by D’Youville University in Buffalo in May this year.

Earlier last month, a short video clip circulating on social media had sparked amusement and concern as it unveiled the inner workings of a Chinese humanoid robot factory.

The uploaded video on TikTok is known to be from the manufacturing floor of the Chinese robotics firm Ex Robots.

Humanoid robots are being accepted at various levels and are being taught to do multiple tasks, their importance is likely going to increase in the days ahead and Stanford team’s HumanPlus too could go the distance and make its mark.