With much buzz and excitement ‘1X’ has put their much anticipated humanoid home assistant bot ‘Neo’ up for pre-order. For the princely sum of $500 monthly or a $20,000 one time fee, Neo promises to be your perfect house keeper, completing all your chores whilst you work, allowing you to return to a clean and orderly home, all thanks to Neo.
But despite the marketing material, it’s seems that at the present moment, the undoubtedly impressive bot is more of a list of promises and aspirations than complete product. In his video titled “The Problem with this Humanoid Robot”, Marques Brownlee highlights all the ways the dream and the reality aren’t meeting up quite yet. With much of the demo’s given in their marketing material and to journalists being tele-operated by human “pilots” using VR goggles and controllers. If you haven’t seen the video i recommend you check it out here:
Whilst at first lig...
With much buzz and excitement ‘1X’ has put their much anticipated humanoid home assistant bot ‘Neo’ up for pre-order. For the princely sum of $500 monthly or a $20,000 one time fee, Neo promises to be your perfect house keeper, completing all your chores whilst you work, allowing you to return to a clean and orderly home, all thanks to Neo.
But despite the marketing material, it’s seems that at the present moment, the undoubtedly impressive bot is more of a list of promises and aspirations than complete product. In his video titled “The Problem with this Humanoid Robot”, Marques Brownlee highlights all the ways the dream and the reality aren’t meeting up quite yet. With much of the demo’s given in their marketing material and to journalists being tele-operated by human “pilots” using VR goggles and controllers. If you haven’t seen the video i recommend you check it out here:
Whilst at first light this might seem like a “scam” or a simple cases of false advertising, the reality is far more interesting. Marques suggests that 1X is reading from the Tesla self driving playbook and that building a fleet of tele-operated bots (what they call expert mode) now will yield huge dividends in the long term.Looking at the hardware it’s self we see that this first generation Neo bot is no toy. It’s a serious piece of hardware and engineering, with my guess being that the $20,000 price tag is far below current manufacturing costs. It has dexterous hands capable of manipulating objects, it’s capable of lifting over 150 pounds (68 kg) and carrying 55 pounds (25kg), has a continuous working battery life of 4 hours and is boast the latest NVIDIA Jetson Thor chip designed specific for embodied AI applications.
Redwood AI is 1X’s in house AI model that drives the brains of Neo. But despite
