Most humanoid robots (most) look very impressive while in motion. Ubtech’s Walker S2 robot, which couldn’t be more aptly named right now, is certainly one of those. The Chinese company that makes these guys has released a video showing a batch of the ‘bots moving from their warehouse home to… somewhere else.
As a group, no less. Seeing them all move from a standing start to their eventual destination is a disconcerting spectacle. Of course, that’s exactly what it’s supposed to be. Knowing that the human-sized (and human-equivalent weight) artificial construct can swap its own batteries is cause for even more concern.
Walker S2: Guangdong Ranger
Ubtech is calling this the first mass delivery of humanoid robots, and, in motion, it does look awfully like a scene from the 2004 film I, Robot. You know, the one where battalions of robots turn on their human owners thanks to a malicious update? But these guys probably aren’t ready for the big time just yet. As factory drones, though…?
The Walker S2 is the latest generation of industrial robots from the Shenzhen-based company, designed to take on factory roles like fetching and carrying, inspections, sorting, and loading. How effective they are remains to be seen on this side of the world, but the robots have the size and bulk to do human-scale work.
The robots stand 1.76 metres tall and weigh 70 kilograms — more than enough to cause problems for any human faced with one in combat. They’re actually a little faster on their feet than the average human at two metres per second, but lack the grip strength to really give intrepid humans (preferably named John Connor) too many hassles.
However, they can hot-swap their batteries. If you’re being chased around a factory floor by a berserk army of Walker S2 ‘bots, there’s no point in finding an elevated position and waiting for them to run flat. They’ve evolved beyond that point.
Other features include a flexible waist, LLM integration (so they can talk to you), and a microphone-speaker-camera combination seated in the impressively blank faceplate. Ubtech says its camera tech offers “”human-eye” stereoscopic perception capabilities” thanks to “deep learning-based stereo depth estimation algorithms to generate high-precision, left-aligned dense depth maps in real-time.” But we’re not worried about the Walker S2. Not yet, anyway.
