New Tesla Killer? 82 Joint Humanoid Robot 2250 TOPS (AI NEWS)

But first, as for its form factor, it stands 1.7 meters tall or about 5 feet 7 inches, and it features 82 joints in total, including 4 degrees of freedom in these newly designed bionic shoulders for better movement. But when we look at the outer form factor of the robot, we can see it has this natural gait. And this is thanks to this bionic shoulder design, as well as its bionic spine, which can bend and flex its lumbar, just like a human we can see in this walking gait here. And it’s customizable, meaning it comes in different body shapes and genders.

Obviously, this one is a female, but it also comes in male, and you can get them as fatter or slimmer. And it’s fully covered in the soft skin with touch sensors built in, especially in the hands for more natural interactions. And when it comes to this 3D curve display, it can listen, talk, and see, as well as show expressions. And in terms of its hands, 22 degrees of freedom, just like a human. And it features flexible feet, which we’ll get into in just a second. But it also has an industry first all solid state battery, which is now 30% lighter while packing 30% more power for a runtime that is currently unspecified.

But we do know that this battery can operate at 250 Celsius or 482 degrees for an hour. So at least this will be able to run for an hour or more. And this solid state battery actually takes quite a bit of abuse. In fact, it can withstand 300 times the force of gravity or take punctures that are 3 millimeters deep. And in terms of the AI computing power on board, it packs three Turing AI chips with maximum computing power of 2,250 tera operations per second, which Xpeng claims to be the most powerful robot in the industry.

And on board, they have three integrated large language models. First, they have a vision language action model that they’re using in their cars. Then they also have a vision model and a brand new VLT model, which stands for Vision Language Task. And this is the core engine for autonomous action, acting like the AI’s brain for real world decision making on body movement, hand adjustments and actions, as we can see it walking here. And Xpeng says that they’re following the fourth law of robotics, which states that the robot can’t disclose human privacy. This is beyond Asimov’s three laws.

And the robot comes with an active safety protection system that prevents it from harming people, pets or objects. But when is this robot going to be available for purchase? For now, they’re shooting for an April 2026 target for full on mass production. And in terms of how this robot fits into a commercial deployment, they’re targeting three scenarios up front. Firstly, being tour guides, second, shopping guides and third, company receptionists. But Xpeng is also taking an approach like Tesla, where they’re deploying iron in their stores to introduce their products as well. And they’re featuring this open software developer kit for global developers to create secondary applications on top.

All these tech specs bring us to some questions. Firstly, what is this robot going to cost with Tesla aiming at a $20,000 to $30,000 price tag? Can Xpeng compete on this level? Also, in terms of maintenance, how does it work? Is it a warranty like a car or do you have to fix it part by part yourself or bring it into a shop? And in terms of battery replacement costs, solid state batteries are extremely expensive. So is this going to cost thousands of dollars to replace the battery every few years? And how many charge cycles does it support? Next, there’s the issue of insurance.

If you spend $20,000, $30,000, $50,000 on a humanoid, how much does it cost per month to make sure that this thing doesn’t get stolen or destroyed? And last but certainly not least, what skills and abilities should this robot come with out of the box? And how do you train this robot to do new tasks? Or does this go back to this SDK for global developers to build on top of? But nobody’s compared the Optimus and the iron side by side. So let’s take a look at you tell me which you think is the better robot.

But on top of the iron robot, physical robotics just introduced their own PI robot, which is an upper body humanoid that’s designed to work alongside people in places like factories and hospitals. And the main thing that sets PI apart is how it handles objects. Instead of moving to specific positions like most industrial robots, it uses force control to actually feel what it’s gripping so it can pick things up without crushing them or letting them slip away. And this matters because it means that the robot can handle delicate or varied objects, much like a person would, which opens up a lot of new tasks that have been difficult to automate before because they required a sensitive touch.

And PI’s hands are built with multiple degrees of freedom in each joint, meaning that the fingers can move independently and adjust on the fly when holding, twisting, or balancing something. And it runs on what the company calls a physical intelligence brain, which is basically an AI system that lets the robot sense what’s happening around it and respond appropriately in real time. And one practical advantage of the PI is that it’s built to human dimensions and it moves like a human would with comparable strength, which means that it can fit into existing workspaces without needing special accommodations or redesign workflows, and it can use the same tools and work at the same stations that were designed for people.

In fact, physical robotics is manufacturing everything in-house, and it’s automated a lot of the component production which they say helps keep costs competitive while maintaining quality standards. And they design the whole thing from the ground up with mass production in mind rather than treating scalability as an afterthought. And the vertical integration of their supply chain is supposed to give them an edge in pricing when compared to competitors, although that is to be determined. And the company was founded in May 2024 by Dr. Fong Nagayan, who previously co-founded Haloti Robotics, which is now called 1X Technologies, where he led the development of the EVE robot, and he’s been working on robotics for over two decades with about nine years specifically focused on humanoid robots.

And according to him, humanoid robots have really picked up attention in the last few years after what felt like a long period where the tech wasn’t quite ready, and he feels like we’re now at an inflection point where these machines might actually start becoming practical, real-world workers. And the Pi robot isn’t just designed to do tasks, but also collect precise data that could help train the next generations of its AI systems to handle its own physical tasks better in the future. So overall, their goal seems to be that they’re creating these robots to take over routine and repetitive tasks while being able to collaborate with humans safely rather than replacing them entirely.

But how will the Pi compete with 1X’s Neo, or are they completely separate use cases, different robots for different tasks? Anyways, like and subscribe, make sure to check out this video here, and thanks for watching. Bye. [tr:trw].