At IO-AI Tech, startup located about 45 minutes north of downtown Shenzhen, China, I saw a crazy up-to-date frontier in blue-collar work. Workers wearing the company’s VR headsets, handheld controllers and motion-tracking equipment remotely control humanoid robots in workplaces such as factory floors and convenience stores. The business wants robots to do useful work like stacking shelves and picking items from trash cans, but it also wants to collect training data that will one day allow bots to operate autonomously.
To show off the technology, the company invited me into their office, where I was allowed to control 10 humanoid robotic hands, each from a different company, using a custom motion-tracking glove. The device immediately transferred my finger movements to all 50 digits of the robot.
I’m a little embarrassed, but the first thing I tried with this futuristic equipment was to utilize all 10 hands to flip the bird. Once I took it out of the system, I was impressed by how quickly my movements transferred to the robot’s hands and how easily the technology worked in both directions – I could feel the ball placed in one of the electronic hands.
Courtesy of Will Knight
The company also allowed me to try out a system that is being tested by a Chinese convenience store chain. Using the VR headset and a pair of grippers, I tried to pick up boxes of medicine from the shelf. It was disorienting at first: I had to adjust to the slight difference between my movements and the robot’s movements that I saw through the headset. However, after a little practice, I was stacking shelves like a robot boss.
Elsewhere, I observed people wearing virtual reality headsets and body-tracking sensors reminiscent of Ready Player One. In one enormous room, I saw workers using a number of different systems to control Unitree’s minuscule humanoids. One person marched with a Unitree robot next to them, and the machine mirrored their movements in an imaginary apartment. The operator, wearing a headset and viewing the scene through cameras placed at the robot’s eye level, performed the steps necessary to take the shirt off the hanger and fold it.
IO-AI is developing technology that transfers human movements to various forms of robots – a useful offering as there are dozens of different humanoids and robotic hands currently available on the Chinese market. The startup’s algorithms also need to combine human control with some level of autonomy, because a person and a robot will not always have the same shape, size and weight. Without some ability to move independently, the robot may lose its balance.