"It's okay if you break it, so spin it as much as you want."
ROBOTIS last month became the first among domestic robot companies to hand over its own humanoid to college students and launch an experiment to have them directly develop desired robot motions using open-source technology. ROBOTIS provided one unit of "AI Sapiens" to four robot club teams at Gachon University, Yonsei University, Seoul National University and Seoul National University of Science and Technology.
The students used released drive and control code and an AI (artificial intelligence) training environment to create new robot movements. For a month during the vacation, they commuted every day to ROBOTIS' headquarters in Magok, Gangseo-gu, Seoul, toppling the robot and standing it back up over and over. During repeated experiments, two actuators broke, and they had to replace more than 10 mainboards.
After a month of trial and error, on the 31st of last month at ROBOTIS' headquarters, four AI Sapiens units each demonstrated different high-difficulty moves. One robot, 153 centimeters tall and weighing 34.8 kilograms, did a windmill by planting one hand on the floor, while another crawled five paces on its belly and then stood up again. One threw a taekwondo kick, and another danced the "Baddie" choreography by K-pop idol Ateez. These were not preloaded demo moves by the company; they were all movements newly trained by the students.
This experiment is the first test bed for ROBOTIS' "open-source humanoid" strategy. Rather than stopping at releasing source code, the company checked with real robots whether college students, not professional researchers, could create new moves in a short period. ROBOTIS is opening everything from drive and control sources to the development environment that transfers moves learned in virtual space to real robots. The plan is to build an ecosystem where external developers can keep layering new AI and motions on this platform.
Students said that using a Korean-made humanoid changed even the speed at which they repeated trial and error. At domestic universities, many use Chinese-made humanoids such as Unitree, which are relatively inexpensive and mass-produced in large volumes. In those cases, if parts broke during experiments, it often took 2 to 3 weeks just to receive new parts, frequently delaying the work.
Jeong Hye-u (24), a member of the Seoul National University robot club, said, "At school we run experiments with the robot body on a safety tether for fear it might break, and if we need a demo video for a paper submission, we unhook it once at the end," adding, "This time, since we could fix parts right away, we went through many more cycles of failing and fixing, and we were able to create moves much faster."
There was also a difference when transferring moves created in virtual space to real robots. The students said that with Chinese bodies, detailed control information is limited and hardware tolerances are often large, so moves that worked well in simulation often changed on the actual robots.
Chae Seung-jun (25), a member of the Seoul National University of Science and Technology robot club, said, "For Chinese mass-produced robots, information on the use of parts such as actuators and motors is not disclosed accurately, so it is often hard to narrow the gap between simulation and the real robot," adding, "ROBOTIS actuators have high control precision, which made it much easier to transfer moves created in virtual space to the real robot."
A ROBOTIS employee who listened to the students' presentations that day said, "I was surprised that undergraduates implemented those moves in just a month," adding, "If anything, we were the ones asking a lot about what errors occurred and how they were fixed. We could directly feel why an ecosystem matters."
ROBOTIS' open-source strategy also aims to broaden the base for its flagship actuator, "Dynamixel." All 23 joints of AI Sapiens use Dynamixel. Based on the open platform, the company seeks to increase robot development that uses Dynamixel actuators and expand the ecosystem to core drive components.
ROBOTIS plans to launch "AI Sapiens K1" this month and begin mass production of 1,000 units starting next year. Kim Byeong-soo, ROBOTIS' CEO, said, "I think the moves the students showed today are on a level similar to what came out at a Chinese robot competition last year," adding, "If we mount cameras and the like on the robots and do more of these experiments, by next year we might reach a level similar to China." He continued, "If a company develops alone, the technology either ends within the company or has limits developing in hiding," adding, "Far better results come when many people participate in an open platform, layer their respective technologies and advance them."