Think of a robot that not only imitates you, but learns from every movement you make, that's what Unitree Robotics has just shown the world with its new built-in avatar, a full-body teleoperation platform that turns the human into an extension.
In the launch video, the G1 humanoid applies in real time everything that the opera does: running, kicking, blocking blows, applying boxing blows and even participating in a fight between two Robots, all reflected with impressive speed, the aesthetic immediately recalls the movie “Steel Giants”, but Unitree Robotics makes it clear that this story goes far beyond entertainment.
The spectacle is only the gateway, because after the sequence of cinematic hits, the video changes tone, G1 himself appears performing household tasks with almost obsessive precision, vacuuming the floor, folding clothes, organizing objects, placing drinks in the refrigerator, and it is in that contrast where the revelation lives.
Unitree Robotics calls this technology a full-body data acquisition platform, it is not a toy, it is a mechanism to feed the next generation of physical intelligence, today all companies that want to build general-purpose robots face the same dilemma: How to teach a machine to live in the real world?
Tesla is betting on large-scale simulations and according to some reports also on technology similar to that of Unitree Robotics, although with humans hired and paid for that function; The American Figure also records thousands of demonstrations, but in the case of this specific technology from China Unitree Robotics, the proposal is somewhat more straightforward.
Using humans as pilots, generating movements already compatible with the mechanics of the robot itself, pure movement, clean kinematics, without the gap between human physiology and the skeleton, that is, not only collecting data and images of human movements, but a teleoperation, this human-in-the-loop approach already appears in companies like 1X with its specialist mode, but Unitree Robotics takes this idea to the extreme, creating a robotic avatar capable of being commanded as an alternate body and in doing so captures perfect data to train physics, exactly what the market calls the theft bottleneck.
The Unitree platform solves the problem from the root, instead of translating the human body, it captures movements directly in the robot's body, the incorporated avatar is not a “boxing match”, it is an invisible data factory, a way to accelerate advanced robotics, allowing any researcher or company to generate real, varied and very high quality interactions to train machines that one day act on their own.
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