Thread by @lillianmli

1) Let’s talk about robots in every day Chinese life today. I got videos! Yes!

First up is Unitree’s robotic canines, they are made from off the shelf components and can be yours for under $10k right now, what are you waiting for? Don’t you want bush robot dog?

2) Canine robots are not that common though.

Far more standard is the delivery robots that’s taken off during COVID in universities campuses. These mobile lockers travel around with your packages and you pick them up by entering your delivery code.

3) Since Chinese university campuses are closed off from external traffic for most of this year, these delivery robots have taken as a way to safely transport goods there. This is Alibaba’s Cainiu division for logistics, no doubt they are trialing for on the road use cases

4) Guidance robots like this are very common in big malls now. You enter directions and they’ll take you to where you want to go (or point you there) which is handy for the mega complexes these malls have become

5) I was really impressed by the communication capabilities of these robots. For instance this robot tells the customer that it has to stand still because when it moved before it scared a child in the store and made the child cry. So it now has to stand still.

6) Then I found out, nope, not futuristic NLP. Just another bullshit job. Turns out there are specific remote robot operators that can operate up to 9 of these robots at once and also speak through them. So that was a human speaking to us through the robot.

7) That being said some of the programming is very adorable. I found this clip where the robot turns around and ask the women why she unplugged it (woman wanted to charge her phone) then started to cry since it didn’t have much electricity left, then died 🥺

I’ll be doing threads like this for the rest of Jan, they are usually a bit more wordy.

Follow me if you want these to spam your TL!