Life-Size Humanoid Robot With Dexterous Hands Unveiled at World AI Conference

China-based Humanoid Robots has unveiled Qinglong, a life-size general-purpose humanoid robot at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2024 in Shanghai.

Standing at 5 feet 9 inches tall, Qinglong has dexterous human-like hands, allowing it to perform precise tasks such as manipulating objects.

On display at WAIC, Qinglong picked up soft objects such as bread without damaging them. The humanoid robot also picked up and put down several objects, including cups with ease.

Qinglong’s built-in AI software can determine the level of strength needed to pick up a specific object.

“We introduced vision and touch into Qinglong so that it can have a suitable force during the grasping process, which is a very important flexible grasping application link in the core technology of humanoid robots,” said Xing Boyang, Humanoid Robot’s research and development systems director.

The robot was created by Humanoid Robots, a Shanghai-based research lab chosen by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to establish the National Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center.

Qinglong weighs 176 pounds and has a bionic torso that offers the robot agile movement and anthropomorphic motion control. It has up to 43 active degrees of freedom, allowing for a wide range of motion

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The robot is capable of “athletic” and off-road capabilities, according to the team.

Following Qinglong’s unveiling, Jiang Lei, the National Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center’s chief scientist told TechNode it plans to launch a new humanoid robot model annually with each named after one of the Chinese zodiac animals. Qinglong translates to green or azure dragon.

By 2027, the research lab plans to train 1,000 humanoid robots simultaneously to perform several real-world tasks.

Several Chinese companies have built humanoid robots, including Robot Era's XBot-L and H1 from Unitree.

To help other organizations in the field, the researchers launched an open-source community platform. The OpenLoong platform contains the hardware structure and parameters used in Qinglong, allowing other robotics researchers to experiment and build upon their work.

The researchers behind Qinglong launched OpenLoong to “promote the full-scale application of humanoid robots and support the advent of the era of embodied intelligence.”

They intend to integrate the software package that powers the robot into the platform in the future.

“The most urgent problem to be solved now is to build a platform to enable humanoid robot technology resources to be concentrated,” said Yang Zhengye, Humanoid Robot’s marketing director. “At present, the humanoid robot track is very lively, but many companies are doing the same thing, which is to solve the robot's movement problem first, which will cause a lot of resource waste and prolong the time of technology iteration.” 

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“The National and Local Co-construction Humanoid Robot Innovation Center hopes to allow companies to concentrate on iterating humanoid robot technology on a higher platform.”