humanoid robot NEO gamma does chores as a home assistant

1x develops humanoid robot NEO Gamma for homes

AI company 1x develops NEO Gamma, a humanoid robot that does house chores as an all-round, autonomous home assistant. It’s the upgraded form of the predecessor, NEO Beta, bearing a number of improvements. With this model, the humanoid robot has Emotive Ear Rings so its ears light up when it listens to the owners. NEO Gamma also walks like a real human being, using its natural human gait and arm swings. Because of these features, it can squat down to pick objects from the floor, sit in chairs, and even relieve the grocery bags from its owners’ hands. To make the humanoid robot NEO Gamma more human-feeling, the 1x design team dresses it up with a knit suit.

The 3D printed soft nylon comes to life using a Japanese Shimaseki machine. Wrapped around the robot, it hides its metallic body underneath and gives the smart home assistant a ‘clothed’ look rather than the conventional robotic features. The knit suit also prevents the humanoid robot NEO Gamma from running into fragile objects at home when it moves around. 1x has developed the assistant’s in-house language model that enables it to have a natural conversation and body language. So far, the AI company plans to send its prototype into a home for internal testing.

all images courtesy of 1x

Home Assistant that observes and ‘mimics’ people’s movement

Diving into the design of the humanoid robot NEO Gamma, the 1x team says that its control skills run at 100 Hz learned using reinforcement learning from human motion capture data. It’s because of this that the home assistant has a range of motion similar to a human being. Aside from that, the team has also trained the upgraded robot to see and understand objects at home.

In this way, it can recognize and handle them, even in new environments it hasn’t seen before. The humanoid robot NEO Gamma learns from human control or teleopration as well. This means that the home assistant observes how people do chores and tasks and then mimics them as their own.

the humanoid robot has Emotive Ear Rings so its ears light up when it listens to the owners

Three speakers of AI voice interactions and sound effects

The all-round helper also comes with a built-in voice assistant. This allows people to talk to it as if it were a real human being. The design team says that the humanoid robot NEO Gamma can reply in a natural way because of their in-house language model. There’s no need to press any buttons to talk to the robot. The users can just do so.

1x even has decreased the noise level of the assistant by 10 dB, meaning its operating sound is as quiet as a humming refrigerator. So far, the humanoid robot NEO Gamma features four microphones around it with echo cancellation for a clear audio capture. It comes with three speakers as well: one in the chest for AI voice interactions, and two speakers around the pelvis for bass, 360-degree sound effects, and streaming music. There’s no announcement yet on when 1x plans to send its humanoid robot NEO Gamma to a real home for testing.

NEO Gamma also walks like a real human being, using its natural human gait and arm swings