The Kepler humanoid robot is advertised as a general-purpose robot, and the video above shows it sorting and walking nearly as well as a human toddler. It comes in lots of cool colors, too! Or will, when it actually comes to market.
It has planetary roller screw actuator and rotary actuator technology, it has fingers, and it even has its own operating system. It also has a press corps that says things like, “the robot intricately perceives and analyzes its surroundings. Leveraging deep learning, reinforcement learning, and multi-modal LLM technologies, Kepler’s embodied intelligence unleashes vast potential across various applications.”
The video below combines fiction and animation with the same footage we’ve seen before
Kepler debuted its robot at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, but only as a stationary model. It claims that it will mass produce the Keplerbot this year, but has not yet demonstrated any practical use for its prototype.
The asking price is $30,000, but no you can’t buy one. The Kepler robot is AI-driven, but doesn’t show any signs of its capacity in anything we’ve seen. It may be amazing and revolutionary, as advertised, but who can tell?
The gap
The uncanny valley is the feeling of creepiness we get from things that are very like a human but not exactly like a human, like dolls, clowns, dead bodies, and sometimes robots. But it might also be a good term for the gap between what robots are supposed to be able to do and what they can actually do.
Robots can do amazing things, and there certainly have been great strides in automation. New capacities can sometimes be groundbreaking in terms of technology, or at least in potential promise of technology, without actually doing much in the real world.
But we know by now that dancing robots are no more actually dancing than claymation figures are.
Is it time to close the gap between theater and reality in presenting robotic innovations? Could robot makers and researchers learn to trust us with the truth?
In the meantime, when you need Rexroth motion control service and support, we are the people you should look to. Call us for immediate assistance.
Image courtesy of Kepler