New humanoid robots from China look like creepy pop star action figures – complete with slightly dodgy lip-synch

AI AND ML

They're 90 percent human in some ways, can provide daily companionship psychological support

One of China’s emerging humanoid robotics companies has launched its most-realistic looking models yet and says it has already taken over 13,000 orders for the $17,600/ £13,300 machines.

Here’s a shot of the new machines.

UBTECH's UWORLD U1, which the company bills as "The World's First Full-Size Mass-Produced Ultra-Bionic Humanoid Robot"

You’re looking at the UWORLD U1, which Chinese company UBTECH says enjoys 88 degrees of freedom thanks to use of “a proprietary dual-pivot biomimetic cervical spine, enabling it to replicate up to 90 percent of fundamental human movements.”

The company says the machines are suitable for “long-term companionship” due to what it claims is “the world's first emotion-aware LLM … capable of recognizing more than 20 fine-grained emotional states with an accuracy rate exceeding 90 percent.”

In its breathless announcement, UBTECH says the bots use a “biomimetic fast-and-slow brain architecture” that “draws on cognitive neuroscience principles, enabling a 500-millisecond intuitive response system alongside deep reasoning capabilities powered by models with hundreds of billions of parameters.”

We think the bot's on the right Hand-out

We’re told a “biomimetic expression actuation system … reduces speech-to-lip synchronization latency to within 20 milliseconds, creating a remarkably lifelike interaction experience.”

UBTECH thinks its new bots can provide “daily companionship, emotional support, lifestyle enhancement, and social assistance, as well as reception and hospitality services, elder care, psychological support, tourism and exhibitions, research and education, and premium domestic service applications.”

That companionship can even extend to hitting the dance floor.

Another pic suggests the bots can also be all pouty and stone-faced, like catalk models.

UWORLD U1 hits the catwalk Hand-out

The Register wants to know if they can also run DOOM or play Crysis, but sadly UBTECH hasn’t said much about the Agent Memory OS that powers the bipedal machines.

The company has, however, cooked up its own laws of robotics: users can set hardware safeguards and retain ownership of data which is processed locally whenever possible due to a policy of minimal cloud dependency.

China’s government wants the nation to lead the humanoid robotics industry. State media has even taken to calling the Nanshan District of Shenzhen, a city already famed as China’s tech hub, “Robot Valley.”

The Middle Kingdom is not alone in betting on humanoid bots: SpaceX supremo and occasional US government employee Elon Musk wants to build a million of them each year, and thinks a billion will work and walk alongside us meatbags by 2040. ®