Chinese robot engineers may have stretched further ahead of U.S. rival Elon Musk’s Tesla (TSLA) by making a breakthrough in ‘massaging’ and piano-playing humanoid hands.
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According to a Reuters article, a Chinese robotics startup called Linkerbot has just secured a $3 billion valuation as part of a Series B+ funding round. It is now, it said, seeking to double that by the time of its next financing round.
Major early backers include e-commerce giant Alibaba’s (BABA) Ant Group, Bank of China Asset Management and Fosun Capital.
The buzz around Linkerbot is down to its status as the global market leader in highly dexterous robotic hands for humanoid. It reportedly currently holds over 80% of the global market share in high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) robotic hands, and plans to scale production “soon” to 10,000 units a month from almost 5,000 currently.
CEO Alex Zhou told Reuters: “We aren’t just making hands. Our goal is to replicate the entire library of human dexterous skills within our hardware.”
That means hands not just for holding a feather duster to clean a home but the lightness and deftness to perhaps carry out dentistry, give a massage or play the piano.
Dexterous Dataset
It boasts the LinkerSkillNet platform, which Zhou claims is the world’s largest real-world dexterous manipulation dataset.
The platform is a multimodal data collection system that converts human skills into standardised, reusable capabilities for robotic hands, containing over 500 skills so far. The company supplies some of China’s leading humanoid robot makers as well as some unnamed overseas firms.
However, it is hands-down the trickiest part of humanoid production, including for rivals such as Elon Musk’s Tesla and its ambitions to build the Optimus humanoid.
“The hand is the most complex part of the whole humanoid robot. Elon Musk described on several occasions that the part was taking more than half of their whole engineering effort for Tesla’s Optimus,” said Georg Stieler, head of robotics and automation at technology consultancy Stieler.
Musk however may put up his hands in protest. He has promised that the latest Optimus model, set to be launched this spring, will have the manual dexterity of a human.” That could help close the gap between it and its Chinese rivals.
China has developed a clear lead in the humanoid marketplace with companies such as Unitree and Agibot making robots that can dance, run and twirl in the fields of sport, defense and logistics.
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