- Humanoid recreates an iconic holiday movie scene
- HMND 01 tries its robotic hands at gift wrapping
- It's a humorous demonstration of the capabilities and limits of current robotics tech
Sometimes robot videos are unintentionally funny. Other times, they try for humor and only achieve cringe. Every once in a while, though, you get a little robot comedic gem, actually.
Humanoid HMND 01 Alpha Bipedal, a robot that the company claims was built in just five months and learned to walk in only 48 hours, is back with a new holiday-themed task.
While most robot videos offer almost unbelievable feats of smarts and agility, the teams at Humanoid apparently had something else in mind for this Love, Actually-inspired clip.
In it, the rather imposing 5-ft, 10-inch, nearly 200lb bipedal robot is a store clerk patiently awaiting its next customer. A young woman walks in and requests 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 back end for autonomy and reasoning. So there's no surprise that it can respond and, using its dexterous hands, grab the small robot.
Things take a familiar turn in the video, though, when the robot asks the woman if she'd like it "gift wrapped." When the woman asks for "something simple," the robot, whose tag describes him as a "Gift Wrapping Trainee: One Month Old," suggests an oversized acrylic box. The woman is concerned it's too much, and then HMND 01 delivers a somewhat familiar line, "This is so much more than a box."
Exactly, the robot is playing a stand-in for Rowan Atkinson's store clerk character in the iconic holiday film.
However, the tension about a philandering husband possibly being discovered because Atkinson is taking so long to wrap the gift is replaced with the robot's somewhat clumsy efforts to fill the box with decorations and, among other things, nuts (as in nuts and bolts).
When the woman's husband arrives and asks if she's done yet, HMND 01 explains, "Just a moment, sir. I've only had hands for a week."
It's a cute and 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, we should perhaps give them a bit of time and maybe some guidance on what is appropriate to put in a gift box.
In a final twist, the robot realizes it's made a mess of things, quietly slides the big 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 it walking, moving side to side, picking up delicate objects, and being pushed around without falling over. It does all these things, but the movements are all rather slow and deliberate.
For now, the company is not positioning its fast changing humnoid for consumers. Instead, it has industrial ambitions – and maybe a dream of working at Harrods.
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