The humanoid robot of the future is a hulking specimen with a body that’s made in China and a brain that runs on American silicon.
This week, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, announced a blueprint for the bot, which combines a few different things: a 6-foot, 150-pound robot called H2 Plus from Unitree, a high-flying Chinese robotics startup; a Thor T5000 Nvidia chip; an advanced humanoid hand; and a new suite of software, which makes it easy to program and train the machine. Taken together, they’ll make it easier for researchers, including US academic labs, to put together cutting-edge humanoids and train them with their own AI algorithms.
The Thor chip can run powerful AI models that allow the bot to make sense of its environment and control its movements, while the body features Unitree’s motors, actuators, and sensors. The dextrous, humanlike hand from Singaporean company Sharpa can do everything from card tricks to peeling an apple. (Dexterity remains a key unsolved problem in robotics.)
Spencer Huang, Nvidia’s director of product for robotics, told WIRED that the company wants to provide its silicon smarts for as many humanoid companies as possible. “Unitree is the first, but they’re not going to be the last by a long shot,” Huang said. (Yes, he’s Jensen’s son.) He added that the technology in H2 could potentially make other Chinese robots, including conventional industrial arms, more capable.
In some ways, the partnership is unexpected: Robotics has emerged as a critical new arena for US-China techno-competition, and some politicians have proposed banning Chinese humanoids altogether. Last year, security researchers claimed that Unitree’s robots were capable of capturing and transmitting data, raising security risks.
But in other ways, the team-up makes perfect sense. “This is a fascinating development,” says Scott Singer, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies AI governance and China. Singer notes that while the US has the world’s best AI chips, China’s supply chain gives its robotics companies a hardware edge. “Both sides have key parts of the supply chain that they might be able to weaponize, but here they are working together,” he says.
Courtesy of NVIDIA
Nvidia, for its part, appears to be aware of the security concerns. Besides nimble fingers and a new brain, the new H2 Plus blueprint comes with security features that seem designed to reassure users that their data and models are safe.