- Humanoid recreates an iconic holiday movie scene
- HMND 01 tries out its robotic hands with gift wrapping
- It is a humorous demonstration of the possibilities and limitations of current robotic technology
Sometimes bot videos are unintentionally funny. Other times they try for humor and only achieve creeps. Once in a while, though, you get a little robot comedy gem, actually.
Humanoid HMND 01 Alpha Bipedal, a robot that the company claims was built in just five months and learned to walk in just 48 hours, is back with a new holiday-themed task.
While most robot videos offer almost unbelievable feats of smarts and agility, the teams at Humanoid apparently had something else in mind for this one Love, indeed-inspired clip.
In it, the rather impressive 5-ft, 10-inch, nearly 200 lb bipedal robot is a store clerk patiently waiting for his next customer. A young woman walks in and asks for a toy robot. HMND 01 is equipped with enough sensors (including RGB vision and haptics) to hear the woman’s words and uses an NVIDIA backend for autonomy and reasoning. So it’s no surprise that it can react and, with the help of its dexterous hands, grab the little robot.
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However, things take a familiar turn in the video when the robot asks the woman if she wants it “gift wrapped”. When the woman asks for “something simple,” the robot, whose tag describes him as a “Gift-wrapping student: One month old,” suggests an oversized acrylic box. The woman worries that it’s too much, and then HMND 01 delivers a somewhat familiar line: “This is so much more than a box.”
Exactly, the robot plays a stand-in for Rowan Atkinson’s shop assistant character in the iconic holiday film.
The tension that an argumentative husband might be discovered because Atkinson takes so long to wrap the gift is, however, replaced by the robot’s somewhat clumsy efforts to fill the box with decorations and, among other things, nuts (as in nuts and bolts).
When the woman’s husband arrives and asks if she’s done yet, HMND 01 explains, “Just a minute, sir. I’ve only had hands for a week.”
It’s a sweet and sweet tribute to a classic scene, but also a reminder that these humanoid robots still need time to develop, and as we watch them frolic and try to copy our abilities, maybe we should give them some time and maybe some guidance on what’s appropriate to put in a gift box.
In a final twist, the robot realizes it has made a mess, quietly slides the large box aside and replaces it with a pre-wrapped robot.
What’s next for HMND? Well, Humnanoid uses Nvidia’s Isaac Lab, an open source robot training platform, to accelerate and compress its learning. I’ve seen videos of it walking, moving from side to side, picking up delicate objects, and being pushed around without falling over. It does all these things, but the movements are all quite slow and deliberate.
For now, the company isn’t positioning its fast-changing humanoid for consumers. Instead, it has industrial ambitions – and perhaps a dream of working at Harrods.
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