Robot Era, a China-based company, has demonstrated its latest innovation – XBot-L – by becoming the first humanoid to scale the Great Wall of China.
In a video released by Robot Era earlier this month, the full-sized humanoid prototype XBot-L, standing 1.65 meters tall, is seen navigating sections of the Great Wall, waving hello, showcasing martial arts moves, and performing various other actions.
The Robot Era team aimed to showcase XBot-L’s locomotion, dexterity, and self-balancing capabilities, enhanced by perceptive reinforcement learning algorithms.
This ancient structure presents a significant challenge to any bipedal humanoid with its weathered stone walls and paths.
Typically, wheeled robots or humanoids lacking advanced kinematic support struggle on uneven surfaces or while negotiating staircases.
In the dimly lit archways of guard towers, robots can easily lose their sense of direction and collide with walls due to unreliable perception and navigation systems.
Thanks to advanced perceptive reinforcement learning algorithms, XBot-L can sense its environment, maintain balance, and adjust its pace and gait accordingly.
Perceptive RL algorithms help to strengthen the robot’s perceptive and decision-making capacity in the face of unfamiliar terrains. The robot thus can recognize complex road conditions and adjust its walking stance in a timely manner
Yue Xi, co-founder of Robot Era
Unlike some legged robots that are designed to ascend and descend stairs without perception algorithms, Robot Era ensures that its robots can detect real-time changes in their surroundings and identify obstacles.
As a result, the robot can navigate these obstacles through real-time path planning and motion control.