- Humanoid recreates an iconic Christmas movie scene
- HMND 01 tests his robotic hands by wrapping gifts
- It is a humorous demonstration of the capabilities and limits of current robotic technology.
Sometimes robot videos are unintentionally funny. Other times, they try to be humorous and only manage to shudder. Every once in a while, however, you get a little gem of robot comedy.
Humanoid HMND 01 Alpha Bipedal, a robot that the company says was built in just five months and learned to walk in just 48 hours, is back with a new Christmas-themed task.
While most robot videos offer almost unbelievable feats of intelligence and agility, the Humanoid teams apparently had something else in mind for this. Love, actually-inspired clip.
In it, the towering 5-foot, 10-inch, nearly 200-pound bipedal robot is a store employee patiently waiting for his next customer. A young woman comes in and asks for a toy robot. HMND 01 is equipped with enough sensors (including RGB vision and haptics) to hear the woman’s words and uses an NVIDIA backend for autonomy and reasoning. So it’s no surprise that he can respond and, with his dexterous hands, grab the little robot.
Look
However, things take a familiar turn in the video when the robot asks the woman if she would like it “gift wrapped.” When the woman asks for “something simple,” the robot, whose label describes it as “Gift Wrapping Apprentice: One Month Old,” suggests an oversized acrylic box. The woman worries that it’s too much, and then HMND 01 utters a somewhat familiar phrase: “This is much more than a box.”
Exactly, the robot plays the role of Rowan Atkinson’s store clerk in the iconic Christmas movie.
However, the tension over the possibility of a philandering husband being caught because Atkinson is taking so long to wrap the gift is replaced by the robot’s somewhat clumsy efforts to fill the box with decorations and, among other things, nuts (like nuts and bolts).
When the woman’s husband arrives and asks if she’s done, HMND 01 explains, “Wait a minute, sir. I’ve only had hands for a week.”
It’s a nice, sweet homage to a classic scene, but also a reminder that these humanoid robots still need time to develop, and as we watch them plod along, trying to replicate our capabilities, maybe we should give them a little time and maybe some guidance on what’s appropriate to put in a gift box.
In a final twist, the robot realizes it has made a mess, quietly slides the large box aside, and replaces it with a pre-wrapped robot.
What’s next for HMND? Well, Humnanoid is using Nvidia’s Isaac Lab, an open source robot training platform, to accelerate and compress its learning. I’ve seen videos of him walking, moving from side to side, picking up delicate objects, and being pushed without falling. He does all these things, but all the movements are quite slow and deliberate.
For now, the company is not positioning its rapidly changing humnoid for consumers. Instead, he has industrial ambitions and perhaps a dream of working at Harrods.
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