Lengthy gone are the times when a client electronics firm may merely announce a telephone and name it a day. At this morning’s huge launch occasion in Beijing, Xiaomi adopted up its foldable information by handing the stage over to CyberOne. The bipedal humanoid robotic joined Lei Jun onstage, greeting the CEO and handing him a long-stem flower.

At first look, the robotic isn’t precisely Atlas or Digit, by way of locomotion, but it surely’s nonetheless a promising demo and really a lot not an individual in a spandex swimsuit (not that anybody would try this). It’s the newest signal of Xiaomi’s rising robotics ambitions, which started with vacuums and have since expanded to incorporate final yr’s Spot-esque CyberDog.

We’ve seen loads of client manufacturers flex some robotic muscle at occasions like this, together with Samsung and LG, so it’s powerful to know the place CyberOne falls within the spectrum between critical pursuit and stage spectacle.

Lei Jun was fast to flex the corporate’s funding within the class, noting, “CyberOne’s AI and mechanical capabilities are all self-developed by Xiaomi Robotics Lab. We have now invested closely in R&D spanning varied areas, together with software program, {hardware} and algorithms innovation.”

There’s a particularly broad vary of claims right here, together with the power to learn human feelings. Xiaomi notes:

Humanoid robots depend on imaginative and prescient to course of their environment. Geared up with a self-developed Mi-Sense depth imaginative and prescient module and mixed with an AI interplay algorithm, CyberOne is able to perceiving 3D area, in addition to recognizing people, gestures, and expressions, permitting it to not solely see however to course of its atmosphere. With a view to talk with the world, CyberOne is provided with a self-developed MiAI atmosphere semantics recognition engine and a MiAI vocal emotion identification engine, enabling it to acknowledge 85 varieties of environmental sounds and 45 classifications of human emotion. CyberOne is ready to detect happiness, and even consolation the person in instances of unhappiness. All of those options are built-in into CyberOne’s processing items, that are paired with a curved OLED module to show real-time interactive info.

Equally broad are the promised real-world functions, starting from manufacturing help to human companionship. There can be loads of use for each of those characteristic units sooner or later, however that’s an extended stroll (so to talk) from immediately’s demo. In the intervening time, it in all probability makes probably the most sense to view CyberOne as one thing of an analog to, say, Honda’s Asimo: a promising experiment that’s serves as model ambassador for a few of the work being finished behind the scenes.