Copyright SlashGear
Companies building humanoid robots are all the rage these days. Elon Musk is promising to sell enough motion-capture-trained Optimus bots to make up the vast majority of Tesla's value, while a company named 1X has rolled out the Neo, a cloth-clad clanker that still needs to be remotely controlled by a human wearing VR goggles. It all feels a bit like a world's fair, where true innovators must compete for attention with carnival barkers. Into that milieu walks the latest human-shaped droid to vie for your attention, a prototype called Iron from a Chinese company named XPENG. There's only one problem: the robot looks like it's hunting Sarah Connor. Absent are the exoskeletons that other robotics companies have designed in order to shield gears and motors from public view. You can straight up see what appears to be a GPU popping out of the XPENG robot's chest, and the result is that it looks like a cross between a Terminator and a Lego Bionicle. What makes it even worse is that the robot comes very close to approximating human motion. Unlike the recently revealed Neo, which stutters and jerks as its limbs are remotely controlled, the Iron prototype can be seen sauntering across a testing room floor with remarkable fluidity in a video posted on YouTube. Although the video of the Iron robot prototype from XPENG has some drawing "Terminator" comparisons, the company doesn't seem to plan on leaving its robot's junk exposed. Like some other shockingly humanoid Chinese robots, XPENG looks like it'll be getting some clothes, as shown in an XPENG presentation that surfaced on YouTube. There's a simplistic cloth look that can only be described as a fencing outfit from "Blade Runner 2049," and the bot was also shown in runway looks ranging from a black business suit to a traditional schoolgirl uniform. Regardless of its attire, XPENG is touting the Iron as a "physical AI," which isn't helping to dispel the threatening aura it gives off. Indeed, the product being hyped is the software that powers the robot, almost more so than the droid itself. The XPENG VLA 2.0 large model, which powers the Iron, is described as "both an action generative model and a physical world model for understanding and prediction" in a company press release. As with the vast majority of AI claims, seeing is believing, and tech demos should be taken with a grain of salt. It's worth pointing out that the viral video shows the robot clearly strapped to a platform on wheels. This platform could be helping to stabilize it, or it may be connecting it to another computer. In any regard, lab testing is much different than real-world application. Until someone makes this gearbox fold their laundry and cook dinner, there's no way to know how advanced its AI truly is.
