On November 13, 2024, the humanoid robot brand CASBOT officially released its first full-size bipedal humanoid robot "CASBOT 01", a general-purpose brain-like intelligent robot for multiple scenarios. This is a brilliant answer from CASBOT in less than a year since its establishment, and it also marks the arrival of a new entrant in the humanoid robot track with rapid commercialization capabilities.

Since its establishment, CASBOT has accumulated many partners in aerospace navigation, emergency rescue, underground operations, industrial manufacturing and commercial services, and explored new scenarios for embodied intelligent business applications. Thanks to the past major project undertakings and practical implementation experience, CASBOT has polished a scenario-oriented development route that drives technology iteration.
Start with the end in mind, born as a human

In the field of embodied intelligence, there is no consensus on the debate about the ultimate form.
In the view of CASBOT team, the world is "measured by people". In the physical world, most environments, objects and tools are designed according to the scale of "people". Therefore, robots that are close to human form can better adapt to the complex physical world. For example, using vision instead of "eyes" to process physical world data, the robot's understanding will not be distorted, and the versatility of humanoid robots will be maximized, and they will truly integrate into the work and living environment of "people".

Aesthetic design, universal bionics

“CASBOT 01” is 179cm tall and weighs 60kg. It has 52 degrees of freedom, a computing power of 550T, and a battery life of more than 4 hours. It also has a more memorable nickname called “Wednesday”, which makes it more approachable through its friendly appearance design. From the product film released, we can see that “Wednesday” can not only stand on two feet and walk steadily, but also organize clothes, assemble desk lamps, replace light bulbs, and even screw in screws.

In terms of ID design, CASBOT 01 achieves a perfect fusion of mechanical engineering and organic aesthetics through the visual decomposition and abstract generalization of human muscle proportions.

As the end effector for fine operations, CASBOT 01's five-finger bionic dexterous hand weighs 800g per hand and has a rated load of 5kg. It adopts a highly compact overall configuration and a bionic design that integrates drive-sensor-sensing-control systems, as well as a multi-source perception system design of touch-force-vision. By optimizing control algorithms and motion planning, it imitates the flexibility of human hands in operations, faces fine operation scenarios, and strives to solve the difficulties of "dexterity" and "operation". With the strong support of software and hardware, long-term dexterous operations that can be quickly learned and generalized are realized.

Full stack technology to create application-level products

In the mechanical structure design part, after multiple optimizations, CASBOT has balanced the range of motion and aesthetics. While the whole machine is extremely light, high-strength metal materials are used to process complex curved surfaces to form an ultra-thin hollow cavity with intermediate reinforcement, ensuring the stability and impact resistance of the structure.

CASBOT independently developed three series of integrated joints including planetary, harmonic, and linear joints, with a peak torque density of up to 207Nm/kg and joint efficiency exceeding 80%. The joint uses a force control optimization strategy based on current or sensors, supplemented by model tracking control, and adopts vibration suppression, inertia identification, friction compensation and "gain self-tuning" technologies to achieve high-precision "torque loop" control effects, inertia matching according to the overall needs of operation and control, and improves the dynamic response frequency of a single joint: efficient and stable communication to meet the bandwidth requirements of high dynamic force control: energy management strategies are optimized through impact conditions, combined with servo, single leg and whole machine overcurrent protection measures, and nearly a thousand hours of life testing have been completed to ensure long-term stable operation of the joint.

The excellent structural performance of the body provides a solid foundation for the robot's motion control training.

The overall motion control framework of CASBOT 01 combines adversarial motion priors and whole body control (WBC) to achieve integrated motion control. Through this framework, the robot can robustly perform whole-body tasks in complex dynamic environments. On the basis of the traditional reinforcement learning training framework, Lingbao CASBOT simultaneously trained the generative adversarial imitation learning network, the generator and the discriminator to continuously play games, so that the model will generate highly anthropomorphic motion control strategies.

Thanks to the rich and complete database, it can show a variety of different motion capabilities according to the task content, such as walking, running, jumping, etc., so as to efficiently complete the specified tasks, greatly improving the versatility of the model.

At the "brain" level, after evaluating the industry's mainstream "end-to-end embodied large model, segmented decision model, and teaching imitation training skill model", Lingbao CASBOT chose the hierarchical end-to-end model technology route, which can combine the advantages of various routes while avoiding their shortcomings.

In terms of model training, Lingbao CASBOT adopts an innovative technology route from real to virtual, data synthesis, hybrid training, and then from virtual to real. Through layered end-to-end models and hybrid training technology, robots can be made more intelligent, flexible and autonomous.

When the "body" and "brain" work closely together, the robot gains the ability of high-level cognition, understanding and decision-making planning.

The head of CASBOT 01 has two degrees of freedom and is equipped with multiple RGBD cameras, lidars, IMUs and other sensors, which can perform dual visual and auditory interactions. Under the operation framework, through end-to-end multimodal dexterous operation large models, distillation and quantization technologies, the robot hand successfully realizes the generalization and adaptability of "environment, object, task".

Scenarios feed back technology, tapping into a 100 billion market

2024 is considered the "first year of commercialization of humanoid robots". A recent report released by the China Humanoid Robot Industry Conference shows that the scale of the Chinese humanoid robot market will reach 2.76 billion yuan in 2024, and is expected to grow into a 100 billion yuan market in 2030.

Behind the data are two sides of the development of the humanoid robot industry: on the one hand, thanks to its strong industrial penetration and industrial integration capabilities, it has become an important force for "new quality productivity" and a new pillar for promoting the high-quality development of China's economy; on the other hand, with a market scale of 100 billion, commercialization has become a "must-answer question" for the humanoid robot industry.

In September 2024, Lingbao CASBOT and Lenovo Manufacturing as a Service signed a strategic cooperation agreement and became the first batch of core cooperative enterprises of Lenovo's "Spark Plan". The two parties have created a new paradigm of "two-way empowerment" cooperation, laying the foundation for the commercialization and application of Lingbao CASBOT's humanoid robot products.

For Lenovo, the introduction of Lingbao CASBOT's technological innovations in flexible force control and precision operation in Lenovo's intelligent manufacturing factory can not only improve the automation level of the production line and reduce production costs, but also directly inject new vitality into Lenovo's intelligent manufacturing factory and bring breakthrough assistance to Lenovo's intelligent manufacturing upgrade.

For Lingbao CASBOT, real commercial scenarios can enable technology iteration, and deep cultivation of application scenarios will help it to be at ease in diversified scenarios in the future, thereby achieving the "universal" demands in the industry.

In order to better serve the market and meet the diversified needs of different industries, Lingbao CASBOT will also open the basic skills library of humanoid robots to all industry partners to jointly build a more refined professional skills library, and look forward to better understanding the needs of different industries, so that humanoid robots and embodied intelligent technologies can serve various scenarios and ultimately serve people.

Continuous iteration, intelligent symbiosis

Just as the theme of CASBOT conference is "Born for Humanity" - this is the vision CASBOT, to unleash human potential with intelligent technology.

At the conference, CASBOT 01 also released "ONE MORE THING" - "CASBOT NEXT GEN" on behalf of the host. As an upgraded version of CASBOT 01, it will be equipped with Embodied Brain 2.0, Visual Basic Large Model 2.0, and an upgraded version of the universal motion prior controller, and a dexterous operation large model, which can complete the whole body motion posture following control and human operation video data mixed training, and achieve two-way improvement of motion operation.

It is foreseeable that CASBOT will continue to be at the forefront of technological innovation and commercial implementation scenarios, and through continuous cultivation in the B-end market, it will lay a solid foundation for the "ultimate competition" in the future C-end market. With the step-by-step technological evolution and product verification, I believe that in the future, CASBOT will eventually realize the future vision of "creating an intelligent innovation species and shaping a new world of intelligent symbiosis."