SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
At the banquet, a televised celebration and cornerstone for China close to the Super Bowl for the United States, four rising humanoid machine startups, Unitree Robotics, Galbot, Noetix, and MagicLab, showcased their items.
The first three sketches of the program strongly featured humanoid robots, including a long martial arts presentation where more than a hundred Unitree humanoids performed elaborate fight scenes while circling human performers with swords, poles, and nunchucks.
A physically challenging battle sequence was included that mimicked the shaky movements and downward falls of China’s “drunken fighting” martial arts style, showing innovations in fault recovery and multi-robot co-ordination.
planned Investments
During the attractive nine-day Lunar New Year people vacation, local artificial intelligence start-ups release a raft of border models while big players like AgiBot and Unitree prepare for initial public offerings this year.
16 full-size Unitree beings danced in harmony with human performers at last week’s dinner, which stunned the audience.
The first of its kind since 2018 saw the leader of Unitree meet Chinese President Xi Jinping at a high-profile technology conference days later.
In the same year, Xi met five robotics start-up founders, making them superior to the four electrical vehicle and four silicon entrepreneurs he had previously met.
industry strange visibility
The CCTV system, which drew 79 percent of live TV viewers in China last month, had for decades been used to promote Beijing’s technology goals, including its place system, drones, and robotics, according to Georg Stieler, Asia managing director and head of robotics and automation at technology consultancy Stieler.
The directness of the pipeline from industrial policy to prime-time spectacle is what sets the gala apart from comparable events elsewhere, Stieler said.
” Companies that show up on the gala stage are rewarded in tangible ways with government orders, investor interest, and market access,” the statement read.
The performance increase is remarkable, according to Stieler, who noted that Unitree’s focus on creating robot “brains”- the AI-powered software that enables them to perform fine motor tasks in real-world factory settings.
China’s advantages
China has placed robotics and AI at the center of its next-generation AI+ manufacturing strategy, betting on productivity gains from automation will help it deal with the pressures of its aging workforce, despite the spectacle of robots running marathons and performing kung-fu kicks and backflips.
“Humanoids bundle a lot of China’s advantages into one narrative: AI capability, hardware supply chain, and manufacturing ambition. They are also the most ‘legible’ form factor for the public and officials,” Beijing-based tech analyst Poe Zhao said.
Attention turns into a resource in an early market.
According to research firm Omdia, China accounted for 90 % of the roughly 13, 000 humanoid robots shipped globally last year, far outpacing US competitors like Tesla’s Optimus.
Morgan Stanley projects that China’s humanoid sales will more than double to 28, 000 units this year.
As he shifts Tesla toward a focus on embodied AI and its flagship humanoid Optimus, tech billionaire Elon Musk has stated that he expects his biggest rival to be Chinese companies.
” People outside China undervalue China, but China is an ass-kicker next level,” Musk claimed last month.
Reuters
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