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Last week, Chinese electric vehicle company Xpeng debuted its humanoid robot, Iron. Striding across the stage at the company’s AI Day event, the robot’s movements were impressively smooth—perhaps, some folks on social media suggested, too smooth.
In fact, many took to the comments to declare the robot was actually just a person in a suit—after all, it wouldn’t be the first time. However, company CEO He Xiaopeng has since attempted to expose the Iron’s mechanical innards, both on-stage and off (via Mashable).
After offering a sneak peek of what lies beneath the Iron’s soft shell on social media, Xiaopeng then took to the stage for a more drastic demonstration. For the banishment of all doubt, the Xpeng robotics team took a pair of scissors to the Iron, cutting away not only its soft outer shell but its artificial muscles as well, completely exposing the metal rod supports and servos below.
The Iron is very clearly not a person in a morph suit—however, that doesn’t mean it’s the future either. The smoothness of this robot’s movements across a completely flat surface is impressive, though I’m a little unclear on what gap in the market the Iron hopes to fill as it approaches mass production.
We’ve seen our fair share of robotic projects from big tech in recent months, such as Tesla’s Optimus and 1X Technologies’ Neo. However, given that Optimus struggles to answer simple questions like ‘where can I get a Coke?’ and the Neo will lean heavily on tele-operation when it launches next year, autonomous robots are far from a reality.
As Mashable cites, it’s Moravec’s Paradox in action; what may seem easy for a human to carry out will be exponentially more complicated for a machine. Case in point, a tele-operated Neo robot trying and failing to close a dishwasher.
There’s also a weird gender element here that is certainly not lost on me. For one thing, many robots touted as household helpers have an almost gender neutral appearance, as though big tech is purposefully trying to avoid a frank examination of who is otherwise most likely to carry out this domestic labour.
However, the demo model of the Iron cuts a distinctly more feminine silhouette (in other words, they gave it a robo-rack). This isn’t the only option available for the Iron, but it is the one Xpeng chose to demo on-stage before cutting off its flesh. Notably, Xiaopeng even felt the need to apologise to the demo model before ‘exposing’ what made it tick, telling his AI Day audience, “I want to solemnly say to it first: I’m sorry—I hope this is the last time that Iron has to prove it is itself.”
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