Recently Hangzhou, Zhejiang based Unitree announced a humanoid robot that costs just 39,999 yuan, or 5,900 USD.
It is capable of doing complex movements like hand stands, cartwheels, punching, lying down prone, and standing up again on its own. It weighs 25 Kilos, and is about as tall as a smaller sized human.
I think this is an area we should be paying very special attention to. AI is getting all the hype, but it’s unlikely to have a big effect on the outcome of a war. Being able to mass produce soldiers though? That’s a game changer.
These robots would work in any terrain a human can once water proofed, and could be remotely piloted by human soldiers. Retrofitting them with weapons systems would be simple, and they could have armor plating added on so they could just stand under heavy fire and be fine. You’d need higher caliber rounds to take them out. (Exactly the things that the US is floundering to secure metals to make since China controls so much of the rare earth industry).
I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that these could be the equivalent of the invention of the musket. If WW3 happens sometime in the next decade i expect the world to be shocked as it becomes clear war will never be the same again. It’s like a countdown has begun where everyday we get closer to the moment one of these is first used in a peer conflict, and an arms race begins. One China already seems to be winning before it even starts.
When I was a kid this is how we imagined war would be in the future. Instead of sending people you send mass-produced infantry robots. Except we never thought it would become real.
I def. think there will be novel usecases out of them, much like commercial drones have been. Nobody expected quadcopters to become so prevalent on the front and yet they did. To get an idea of how they could be used, imagine yourself as a soldier on the front line and you have one of these bots. What would you have it do? I think carry equipment is one (you could also get those robot dogs to do that, but it’s a possibility), maybe even give it some anti-drone equipment of some kind? These are basically vehicles that can follow you in any terrain. The size factor is also a huge point, you could send it to recon ahead while still retaining your entire team operable, or make a bunch of them dig your trenches before the infantry moves in. They can hide much better than any human could due to how small they are.
I don’t think you even need to wait for WW3, they’re gonna be rolled out as soon as the price goes down to under 2000 dollars.
I’m still not entirely sure how they perform tasks though, how much you need to manually program them to do that and reprogram them to do another thing. To be honest to this day I still haven’t found out anything about how they work, you usually just see the promo videos.
What I could really use one of those robots for is doing the chores around the house 😭
There is a developer on YouTube that got his hands on a $50k G1 (with working hands) and he has been showing how to make it do things. I found it very interesting.
The basic idea, from what I understand, is that these robots are just now getting the software needed to actually stand and move around without falling, and that’s basically all these robots are shipped with. Anything other than walking and running needs to be programmed to be done, but now that we have LLMs it’s just beginning to be possible to program the robots to automatically decide how to move around and how to interact with the environment.
So, because of that, money and effort are now increasingly being invested into developing these robots into fully automous, and consequently the the prices are now quickly falling because the production at scale is finally happening in anticipation of the software needed being developed soon.
Oh yeah, I expected that they would basically be a dev kit and you have to code everything in yourself. I didn’t expect that it would be so manual though, I thought their basic function was that they could stand up and walk by themselves, but apparently you even have to code that in before you make it do more advanced stuff. Interested to see how it handles actual tasks (like even just picking up an object) later on hopefully.
edit: I assume since this is a dev kit they are expecting a market to pop up around these robots, probably even other companies rebranding them with their own name and selling them for specific purposes out of the box (e.g. chores)
The first area i think they’ll show up related to military/security is in non-lethal take downs. A robot dog has to rely on something like a taser to restrain someone, but one of these has the ability to do things like put someone in a headlock. They can also ignore small arms fire, and melee weapons. If the police want to arrest an armed suspect who is holed up in a building one of these could just walk right in, smack them upside the head, and restrain them.
25 kilos I’ll be real I’m flipping that thing over if it gets near me 😢
Flipping it over wouldnt really do much lol. Plus keep in mind this is one that’s designed for domestic home use. One made for police would probably be kitted out with ballistic plating, and weigh a lot more.
Guerilla warfare will be reimagined.