HumanPlus (robot)

2024: Product Announcement

At the end of June 2024, Stanford University researchers introduced the humanoid robot HumanPlus, which can not only simulate the actions of people, but is also able to learn how to perform them by tracking movements. The team of researchers claim the robot can learn to play the piano, hit the ping pong ball and box simply by tracking people's actions.

HumanPlus takes about 40 hours of data to learn the task and learn how to perform it step by step. At the same time, it is able to work with both processed motion capture data and raw ones, independently observing people using an RGB camera.

interestingengineering.com

HumanPlus was developed based on the Unitree H1 and Inspire-Robots robots and is 175 centimeters tall. Its design is based on open source code, which means that its set of functions may change in the future as needed. The researchers also released the GitHub repository, which can be accessed by anyone who wants to build a similar model on their own. In addition, the researchers shared pricing data on various details used in HumanPlus.

However, creating a working HumanPlus model from scratch is not so cheap - the researchers of the prototype cost almost 108 thousand dollars. However, given the number of movements that the robot is able to copy, this is one of the most inexpensive and universal options available on the market.

Still, HumanPlus is not alone, with the director Tesla Elon Musk saying more than 1,000 humanoid robots will operate at his company's plants in 2025. Optimus robots are expected to go on sale later that year. Earlier, Musk said that the robot Optimus will become Tesla's most important product, and two autonomous robots are already operating at the company's main plant.^[1]

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