Clone Alpha (humanoid robot)

History

2024: Product Announcement

In early December 2024, the Polish firm Clone Robotics unveiled its first full-scale humanoid robot Clone Alpha with artificial muscles. It is assumed that this approach to reproducing living tissues will allow the robot to successfully reproduce human activities to prepare food and clean the house. Clone Robotics is already taking its first pre-orders and is ready to provide 279 robots to customers.

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Clone Robotics

The new robot's muscle system is based on Myofiber's artificial muscle technology, introduced by the firm in 2021. According to the developers, their artificial muscles have the most attractive characteristics of mammalian skeletal muscles, such as a reaction time of less than 50 ms, a reduction without load of more than 30% and a contraction force of at least 1 kg per 3-gram muscle fiber. According to the company, Myofiber is the only artificial muscle capable of achieving such power, speed and efficiency. At the same time, artificial muscles are attached to certain points on the "bones," as in real animals and humans.

Based on the experience of previous developments, Clone Robotics created a robot that can move like a person. This was achieved by the transition from rigid drives to soft hydraulics. Due to the precise arrangement of the ligaments and tendons, the android has 164 degrees of freedom in the upper torso, including a shoulder with 20 degrees of freedom, a spine with 6 degrees per vertebra and 26 degrees of freedom in the arm, wrist and elbow. The robot is able to instantly control muscle movement with proprioceptive and visual feedback: it is equipped with 4 depth cameras, 70 inertial sensors for joint-level feedback, and 320 pressure sensors for muscle force feedback. They are associated with microcontrollers that send data to the graphics processor NVIDIA Jetson Thor that runs the Clone model Cybernet.^[1]

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