This article comes from WeChat WeChat official account:Cody products go to sea (id: chenfeng element), Author: Chen Feng, original title: "Humanoid Robot Design Guide: How to find a way out for consumers?" 》, the title picture comes from: TESLA
Musk’s product design once again swept our field of vision, this time it was a humanoid robot.
Tesla Optimus Prime Product Design Path
On September 30th, Optimus Prime, which aims to "reshape the future of the labor force", was released, adding more variables to the product design of humanoid robots.
On August 11th, before Tesla, Xiaomi released his own humanoid robot CyberOne, code-named "Tieda". A well-known domestic artificial intelligence solution provider, Ubisoft, also released a new generation of Walker X in October last year.
The isometric drawings of Optimus Prime and other large-scale product designs.
However, if the DEMO released this time is shown to the Japanese fifty years ago, I’m afraid the product designers will be disappointed. As early as 1972, Waseda University in Japan had made the first full-size humanoid robot WABOT, which could communicate in Japanese, navigate indoors and grab objects.
Wabot is highly similar to the DEMO of Optimus Prime.
Fifty years later, humanoid robots seem to be stuck in the castle in the air of cutting-edge technology, and it is difficult to get out of the laboratory and land. Aside from Tesla’s brand aura, where does the future design of humanoid robots lead?
Chronicle of Honda ASIMO product design
From psychology to art, from product application to steering gear cost, humanoid robot may be the most challenging product design in human history.
Challenge uncanny valley.
In the classic book Crossing the Gap, Geoffrey Moore thinks: "The most dangerous and crucial point in the process of high-tech products coming out is the transition from the early market dominated by a few visionaries to the mainstream market occupied by a large number of customers dominated by pragmatists."
Tesla CyberTruck’s sense of the future is inseparable from industrial design.
Compared with Tesla’s previous CyberTruck and Model electric cars, humanoid robots rely more on industrial design. Only in this way can we achieve a thrilling leap from laboratory prototype to commercialization.
The theory of horror valley belongs to the industrial design of humanoid robots. If humanoid robots try to approach real people from various characteristics, users’ expectations for design will be unattainable.
"uncanny valley" Psychological Theory in Robot Design
Once designers pay too much attention to appearance and emotional expression, such as trying to recreate human muscles and skin, they will easily fall into uncanny valley, and become a failed commodity like the "corpses" of countless laboratory DEMO lying at the bottom of the valley.
The list of "scary robots" on IEEE
Zhang Haochong, director of Naiyang Creative Design, said: No matter from the design trend or the current product technology, the more effective design ideas are not to challenge the "uncanny valley", to resist the impulse of design, and to design robots as "digital products" and "home appliances" to avoid the corresponding seats for real people.
This means that on the left side of uncanny valley, there is still a vast design space to prove the consumption value.
How many obstacles are there to overcome in designing the dream humanoid robot commodity?
Overcoming Moravik Paradox
In fact, the design of humanoid robots has never been seen by the AI industry.
In 2012, teacher Kai-fu Lee once commented that the idea that humanoid robots will enter thousands of households immediately is simply nonsense.
Peter teale, the founder of Paypal, came to the same conclusion: "It’s just a simple action to let the robot take out the dirty clothes from the basket and put them into the washing machine". In the opinion of the engineers he communicated with, "it can’t be seen in his lifetime."
The criticism of AI predecessors is not groundless. Its foundation is actually one: Moravik paradox.
Humanoid robots are smart, but their movement ability can never keep up with the algorithm.-Because the existing motors and sensors are not accurate enough, the limbs are extremely underdeveloped. It can copy the story of AlphaGo countless times, easily defeating humans in data calculation and quiz, but it can’t twist a door handle and pick up a water cup accurately-not as good as a three-year-old child.
All children’s sports skills: picking up pencils, running and jumping, and tightening bottle caps-all are the most difficult problems for humanoid robots so far. A cold joke in the AI industry is that manual jobs such as gardeners, receptionists and chefs don’t have to worry about being replaced within 30 years.
The limitation of Moravik’s paradox is what all robot designers need to face up to.
The daunting design cost.
The industrial design of humanoid robot needs abundant funds to irrigate it.
The joints of Tesla Optimus Prime contain a large number of motors.
To create a perfect robot design, ABS plastic shell and color matching are only small heads among small heads, and a large number of joints and servo steering gears are needed to support the design.
Exploded view of millet CyberOne hip motor structure
Relevant practitioners have revealed that the cost of servo steering gear system accounts for 40% to 50% of sports robots. The multi-stage steering gear needed to realize human action design and the high price of accessories force humanoid robots to bid farewell to high quality and low price at the consumer end.
The common servo steering gear on Taobao is expensive.
Tesla shouted out a customer unit price of $20,000 at the press conference, but this is still not an acceptable price for the consumer market.Even in the field of children, considering the lower customer unit price of toy robots, the high cost of motors will not change because of their size, which greatly reduces the cost space.
Small steering gear for children’s toys is also expensive.
For Tesla and any robot, the whole body needs countless steering gears to drive, and the cost fluctuation of any motor is a factor that cannot be ignored when designing products.
Home furnishing field
If you want to design humanoid robots for the home field, the first thing to consider is the material and color matching.
White material is a common color for household appliances in industrial design. It has also become the home color matching standard for humanoid robots.
However, the curse of Moravic’s paradox is the strongest in the field of home.
Although the humanoid home robot has always been a design that attracts people’s attention, it has always been far from the designer’s expectations: since its inception, humanoid robots have been subjected to various "less human-like" home robots.
From 2021 to 2022, Aqara Green Rice and Eurobo completed financing with a total amount of 1 billion yuan respectively. It has become the two largest financing for smart homes in recent years. Humanoid robot and smart home are both capital-intensive industries, but the former is a research and development need, and the profit is far away; The installed capacity of the latter products is well documented.
Aqara’s various professional home robot matrices
In Japan, where ASIMO home robot was born, there is a unique SwitchBot company.
Its product design style is to use a small motor to quickly control the common buttons and door handles at home. To achieve the same function, humanoid robot needs the identification, positioning and linkage of dozens of servo motors.
The humanoid robot needs dozens of steering gears to twist the door handle.
A large number of micro-powered robots directly skipped the defense line of Moravik paradox. When humanoid robots are still studying how to form a mechanical arm with a variety of steering gears, press the switch and unlock the door lock with high precision, the IoT robot chose to reduce the dimension.
The best-selling button robot in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan and Japan.
This is a moment that has appeared many times in the history of industrial design: in the 19th century, Germans once carved guns with the same high quality as works of art, which is still a model of design collection; The British designed a cheap, simple gun which is suitable for rapid and large-scale industrial manufacturing. When low-cost small steering gear can quickly realize the home scene of dozens of heavy steering gear linkage, the balance of war will inevitably tilt to the other side of the humanoid vase.
The search volume of Google Trend, a home robot, is significantly higher than that of humanoid robots after 2011.
What few people know is that before Tesla and Xiaomi’s robots, the once-popular Honda ASIMO home robot officially retired in March 2022.
On March 31st, 2022, Honda ASIMO robot officially retired.
The performance of humanoid robots on the home stage has ended before it started.
Although this expression is somewhat cruel, it is hard not to think that the design behind Tesla’s "Optimus Prime" and Xiaomi’s CyberOne today is just a replica of the defeated soldiers in the home battlefield.
An educational scene that is beyond one’s power
Outside the smart home stage, humanoid robots could have found another way to capture children’s desks as "educational robots".
The design opportunity began in 2017, when the State Council issued the artificial intelligence education policy.
This policy has greatly stimulated the demand for robot education. In front of major companies, it is a grand blue ocean market. In 2018, Ubisoft hired Takahashi Zhilong, who had designed RoBohon robot, as the chief product officer to take charge of product design.
China and Japanese robot industry designers met on the education track.
Everything about the humanoid educational robot looks beautiful.
Take the "Wukong" released in 2019 as an example. The size of the mini makes it not be regarded as a real person, avoiding the pit of the horror valley effect; As the most acceptable interactive carrier for children, humanoid can play the role of children’s learning companion and promote students’ social skills of communicating with others, understanding emotions and expressing. You can also get through all kinds of educational IP and become a traffic portal.
However, there have been professional teachers’ voices opposing humanoid design.
The reason is the familiar Moravik paradox: the educational subjects of humanoid robots are mainly mathematics, physics and engineering project learning, and the reasonable and efficient educational product modeling is actually not bound by humanoid.
The best-selling robots in Amazon, USA, are usually wheeled or tracked.
A robot product designer before making a child’s heart gave an example of an excavator: assuming that the mechanical arm and the principle of the mechanical arm should be taught in the primary school curriculum, the product form should reflect the semantics of mining. In modern classroom teaching, when introducing the popular science of robots, children’s reaction after getting humanoid robots is bound to exceed expectations: "Can it help me move things?" "Can these two robots race?"
Motionblock modular robot is a typical idea of split design according to projects.
Among them, the ability to walk and exercise is far beyond the ceiling that humanoid robots can meet from the beginning.
Teacher Cheng, who has used Alpha and Wukong robots to write courses, said: "Humanoid robots are very cost-effective and can’t support a few classes." Ye Yonghao, chairman of Yuzhi Kechuang, revealed: "Humanoid robots usually have requirements for venues and teachers, and institutions will not use human figures. Primary and secondary schools rarely introduce it. Even if there is, it is also the display purpose led by the Education Bureau. "
Modular educational robot occupying the market
The consensus reached by the education sector not only that teaching should not be restricted by human design, but also includes the need for emotional expression.
In April 2001, in Los Angeles, a studio named Cozmo Robot was established. Its products will be praised by many robot teachers, designers and even small bosses of Dongguan toy factory, and will occupy a very heavy weight in the design history of robots and educational toys.
Vector is not a humanoid design, but the introduction of LED panel brings emotional design to the extreme.
What makes Cozmo famous is the extremely rich emotional design. "This is what robots should look like. Please stop making humanoid robots like nightmares!" Become a representative of the consumer market.
High praise product reviews under the evaluation of Unbox Therapy
Cozmo’s design idea reduces the market’s dependence on human form and turns to richer expression design to meet the better output of children’s content. Drive the head expression of humanoid robot to develop in a rich and delicate direction.
The subsequent development has nothing to do with human form:After 2020, with the outbreak of online education and the decrease of the cost of superimposed screen components, the design trend is to further enlarge the expression panel and cut off the expensive humanoid joints.The industrial design at this stage is essentially a tablet computer dragging its body and speakers.
Image source: finishing by the author
Zhang Haochong, who has participated in Corbit, mTiny and Codey Rocky, pointed out the reasons:No matter the cost of steering gear, the feasibility of technology or the actual cost, its content can not bear the main responsibility of humanoid robot as education.
From school to family, from desks to dining tables, a large number of modular and kit toys and teaching AIDS have occupied the fields that Takahashi Zhilong and humanoid robots once dreamed of. However, due to the lack of support from professional B-end users, the proportion of humanoid modeling in the educational product line will inevitably decline.
Commercial performances and reception scenes
Tesla "Optimus Prime" pays attention to different physical labor scenes, and the commercial exhibition and reception in Chinese mainland is the undisputed home of humanoid robots.
The annual Spring Festival Gala is a battleground for all kinds of traffic operations for China Internet companies; For humanoid robots, it is a window to show product design.
In 2016, 540 Alpha humanoid robots landed in the Spring Festival Evening of the Year of the Monkey, and completed the product appearance in the song of Sun Nan’s "Rushing to the Peak"; Three years later, six Walker robots landed at the Shenzhen Branch of the Spring Festival Evening again. Subsequently, Ubisoft received a $100 million investment from CDH and CITIC Jinshi, and the overall valuation of the company reached $1 billion.
This is a pre-advertised product show. On the one hand, as a new product, it takes an educational process for design to go to the consumer market, and Spring Festival Evening Harmony is the best market promoter of product design. On the other hand, humanoid robots with excellent appearance and tonality in line with business scenes help to drain variety shows and offline shopping malls and tell a more technological brand story.
However, far from the performance of financing aura:In the field of domestic leasing, the product design with good sales performance is actually a wheeled flat-panel robot dominated by domestic Da Yun robots.
SoftBank Pepper, similar to Da Yun, receives robots.
In contrast, Ubisoft’s best-selling commercial reception robot is not a humanoid, but a Cruzr robot that also provides information consultation with a large tablet computer.
The choice of enterprises is clear-cut: avoiding the humanoid design with higher cost and more instability at this stage, and realizing offline service efficiency through AI voice and content. As for whether the product design is bipedal and conforms to the humanoid ideal of designers and engineers, it is not for enterprises to consider.
In any case, the B-end products support the valuation confidence of the industry. In April 2019, the representative of domestic humanoid robot, You Bixuan, started filing counseling at Shenzhen Securities Regulatory Bureau and started the journey of IPO listing.
At this moment, it is less than 10 months before the full-scale outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic.
Epidemic prevention medical care, failed answer sheet
When the epidemic spread around the world, the design route of humanoid robots was also subverted.
Faced with such a large-scale epidemic and the emerging demand for massive service robots, designers suddenly found that wheeled robot talents are the solution to deal with the epidemic quickly.
The medical robot of Cizhi Wei ‘an has no obvious humanoid bipedal design.
As a result, there is no doubt that all kinds of unmanned vehicles have played a far more important role than humanoid robots. After 2020, humanoid robots are absent from both epidemic prevention service robots and rehabilitation service robots released in 2022.
European and American designers from the other side of the ocean, without China and Japan’s attachment to the biped scheme, adopted the wheeled design scheme "pragmatically". At this point, the stage of epidemic prevention and medical service has been decoupled from the design of humanoid robot.
The epidemic in COVID-19 seems to have nothing to do with humanoid robots, but it seriously overdraws the design funds-humanoid robots that are difficult to make profits in the short term and break through the technical bottleneck are even more backward in product application.
Entertainment and IP
The ebb tide of humanoid design does not seem to affect the surrounding IP and film and television products.
Why can today’s humanoid design still occupy a place? Essentially, humanoid robots are still enjoying the afterglow of all kinds of capital, media and IP. It has always been the global animation and film industry that has a profound impact on the product design of manufacturing industry, not the other way around.
When Takahashi Chihiro, the designer of the current article, was still studying at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, the Gospel Warrior of the New Century was already popular in East Asia, and at this moment, it has been 30 years since the humanoid robot Astro Boy was first serialized.
IP has a great influence on public cognition and product design.
When the design of humanoid robots lacks depth and fails to meet the public’s expectations of various classic IP, no matter how much design efforts, it will become a market failure. When one consumer story after another is finished, the humanoid robot persists except for the IP stage, and the audience on other stages has already gone empty.
The only purpose of design seems to be to stimulate investment.
Brand window telling vision
As the ceiling of humanoid design technology, Boston Power is probably a bumpy demonstration of stimulating investment.
Long ago, Boston Dynamics stated that it was, is and will be a money-burning company for a long time.
Although it has solved the problem of humanoid motion performance well enough, it has changed hands three times in seven years, and it has successively moved to Google, Softbank and Hyundai, which accurately illustrates the embarrassing situation that humanoid design lacks profit: enterprises are more inclined to use it as an imaginative tool to mobilize investment value, and once its revenue fails to meet expectations, it will be cut decisively.
This is similar to the underlying logic of Xiaomi’s project to build cars and robot products. Regardless of the impact of releasing humanoid robot products on business, it is definitely timely in stock price and future vision.
Xiaomi CyberOne Design Conference Site
This means that Xiaomi’s brand imagination has a new short-term anchor object.
Today’s Tesla has also learned how to pull this stock price. Musk clearly knows what the brand story about Tesla’s next decade looks like.
Today’s industrial design can’t solve the dilemma that humanoid robots are not popular, and Tesla is not optimistic. Various cost and scenario application problems will also be an urgent problem for Tesla designers.
Facing the Unknown Screenshot of Optimus Prime Tesla Conference
The Design Bonus of Sunset Western Hills
In the history of industrial design all over the world, no design team has completely run through the difficult design road of humanoid robots. How to design a humanoid robot? Musk, peter teale and Kai-Fu Lee have no answers, there is no answer in the history of industrial design, there is no answer in bionic design, there is no answer in motor parameters, and there is no answer in data algorithm.
In any case, humanoid robots will always inspire industrial designers deeply: try not to let backward product forms and concepts guide product appearance and creativity.
Jian li, senior product manager of Hetai, believes that the future prospect mainly lies in the service scene function of the companion.Humanoid has never been an efficient productive form, so when designing products, don’t be bound by the evolution process of carbon-based life, so that the efficiency of robots can not be limited to humanoid.
Nina, director of Naiyang’s creative design and operation, said: After the iPhone came out, all the industrial designs of the old era, such as the touch screen slider, disappeared. The category of "smart phone" has also been settled after years of competition. If Tesla’s "Optimus Prime" can become an iPhone-like classic design and have a profound impact on the industry, even if it is wheeled or modularized and detachable, it is very different from the "humanoid" imagined by consumers. As long as the market opens, everyone will slowly accept the new design.
Before the design proposition of human modeling, not only Tesla designers, but also product designers all over the world may be thinking: can humanoid robots get rid of the unnecessary conceptual constraints and break the original appearance ideas?
The answer to this design proposition will probably affect Tesla and other humanoid robots in the next decade or even twenty years.
References:
[1] Asimo robots retire after an amazing 20-year career. https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/03/2f1164a820ff-hondas-asimo-robot-to-retire-after-20-year-career-wowing-public.html
[2] The commercial confusion of excellent selection https://www.forbeschina.com/investment/56264
[3] Lei Jun learned to be a man from Musk, and Xiaomi released the first humanoid robot. https://www.163.com/dy/article/HET7931H0511D0C3.html
[4] https://insideevs.com/news/458170/tesla-design-boss-cybertruck-inspiration-fighter-jet/
[5] Ubisoft announced the completion of the $820 million Series C financing. After a valuation of $5 billion, we interviewed CEO James Zhou. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/36386388
[6] Can you get science and technology innovation board’s wish if you are a must-have in the Spring Festival Evening?https://new.qq.com/rain/a/20210219A02HRS00
[7] https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/cozmo-vector-how-anki-designs-robots-emotional-intelligence
[8] Spring Festival Evening robot Walker: 10 seconds on stage, more than 1200 hours off stage https://www.sohu.com/a/293463936_99985415.
This article comes from WeChat WeChat official account:Cody products go to sea (id: chenfeng element), author: Chen Feng
