Chinese robotics company Dobot has shown off its humanoid robot, dubbed Atom, preparing a sumptuous breakfast.
The video, titled “Rise and Shine with Atom, Your New Breakfast Buddy!” shows the robot using its long, flexible arms to place pieces of ham, sausages, slices of toast, and cherries onto a plate. The robot even poured a glass of milk and lifted the tray for serving.
“Add some cherries, too,” an American-accented voiceover says. “Such thin stems won’t trouble me. Just two fingers are enough to grip it firmly.”
“All done!” the voice says. “A nutritious breakfast sets the tone for a perfect day.”
While it’s unclear how much of Atom’s skills could actually be transferred to a messy and unpredictable real-world kitchen — rather than what’s obviously a carefully controlled studio — it’s yet another demonstration that highlights how far the technology has come.
There’s a strong sense of enthusiasm in the industry for the future of humanoid robots that can assist in the home, with companies like Tesla, Figure, Agility Robotics, Unitree, and 1XÂ showing off bipedal machines that could feasibly prove useful in a future home environment.
Whether these robots will ever be affordable for the average consumer is an open question. But the costs are already starting to come down, with Chinese robotics company Unitree, for instance, offering a lineup of capable quadripedal robots for a fraction of the price of a Boston Dynamics Spot Mini. Its humanoid robot G1 is also already being mass-produced and goes for $16,000.
Dobot’s Atom is no slouch, with 28 degrees of freedom and an arm movement precision of just 0.05 mm. An AI system dubbed Robot Operator Model-1 allows the five-foot bot to adapt to its environment autonomously. It boasts a computing power equivalent to a contemporary gaming graphics card, as the South China Morning Post reports.
The company claims Atom can also solder electronic components and calibrate precision instruments, which require extremely steady and precise arms and hands.
Dobot announced its humanoid robot will go on sale for $27,500 sometime later this year, and has already started taking preorders.
It wouldn’t be the first to enter mass production. Humanoid robots have already started working at warehouses to complete human jobs.
“Humanoid robots are the first category of robots that can be doing completely different tasks based on the needs of the business or the time of the shift,” Adrian Stoch chief automation officer of GXO Logistics, which recently employed two Digit bipedal robots from the firm Agility Robotics, told the Wall Street Journal.
“In the future, we could have Digit unloading a trailer in the morning, picking goods in the afternoon, and loading trucks in the evening,” he added.
More on humanoid robots: Humanoid Robots Are Starting to Work Human Warehouse Jobs
