On November 13, 2024, the humanoid robot brand Lingbao CASBOT officially released its first full-size bipedal humanoid robot, "CASBOT 01", a general-purpose brain-like intelligent robot designed for multiple scenarios. This is a remarkable achievement for Lingbao CASBOT within less than a year of its establishment and marks the entry of a new player with strong rapid commercialization capabilities into the humanoid robot sector.

Since its inception, Lingbao CASBOT has accumulated numerous partners across various fields such as aerospace, maritime, emergency rescue, underground operations, industrial manufacturing, and commercial services, and has explored new scenarios for the commercial application of embodied intelligence. Thanks to its experience in undertaking major projects and practical implementation, Lingbao CASBOT has developed a scenario-oriented development path that drives technological iteration.

Start with the end in mind, born to be human

In the field of embodied intelligence, there is no consensus on the ultimate form.

From the perspective of the Lingbao CASBOT team, the world is "measured by humans". In the physical world, most environments, objects, and tools are designed according to human scales. Therefore, robots that resemble humans can better adapt to the complex physical world. For example, by using vision to process physical world data instead of eyes, the robot's understanding will not be distorted, ensuring the versatility of humanoid robots to the fullest extent and truly integrating them into the work and living environments of humans.

Aesthetic design, versatile biomimicry

"CASBOT 01" stands at 179cm tall, weighs 60kg, has 52 degrees of freedom, boasts a computing power of 550T, and has a battery life of over 4 hours. It also has a memorable nickname, "Wednesday", which gives it a friendly and approachable appearance. As seen in the product video released by Lingbao, "Wednesday" can not only stand and walk stably on two feet but also sort clothes, assemble table lamps, change light bulbs, and even screw things together.

In terms of ID design, CASBOT 01 achieves a perfect fusion of mechanical engineering and organic aesthetics through the visualization and abstraction of human muscle proportions.

Full-stack technology to create application-level products

In the mechanical structure design, after multiple optimizations, Lingbao CASBOT has balanced the range of motion and aesthetic appeal. With the extreme weight reduction of the entire machine, high-strength metal materials are used to process complex curved surfaces, forming an ultra-thin hollow cavity with reinforced center, ensuring structural stability and impact resistance.

Lingbao CASBOT has independently developed integrated joints in three series: planetary, harmonic, and linear, with a peak torque density of up to 207Nm/kg and joint efficiency exceeding 80%. The joints use force control optimization strategies based on current or sensors, supplemented by model tracking control, employing technologies such as vibration suppression, inertia identification, friction compensation, and "gain self-tuning" to achieve high-precision "torque loop" control. They match inertia according to the overall requirements of motion control, improving the dynamic response frequency of a single joint: efficient and stable communication meets the bandwidth requirements of high-dynamic force control; through optimizing energy management strategies under impact conditions, combined with servo, single-leg, and whole-machine overcurrent protection measures, nearly a thousand hours of life tests have been completed to ensure the stable operation of the joints for a long time.

The robot's excellent structural performance provides a solid foundation for motion control training.

CASBOT 01's overall motion control framework combines adversarial motion priors and whole-body control (WBC) to achieve integrated motion control. Through this framework, the robot can robustly perform whole-body tasks in complex dynamic environments. Based on the traditional reinforcement learning training framework, Lingbao CASBOT simultaneously trains a generative adversarial imitation learning network, with the generator and discriminator continuously competing, enabling the model to generate highly human-like motion control strategies.

Thanks to a rich and complete database, it can exhibit various motion abilities based on task content, such as walking, running, jumping, etc., efficiently completing specified tasks and greatly enhancing the versatility of the model.

At the "brain" level, after evaluating the mainstream industry's "end-to-end embodied large models, segmented decision-making models, and demonstration imitation training skill models", Lingbao CASBOT chose a hierarchical end-to-end model technology route that combines the advantages of various routes while avoiding their shortcomings.

In terms of model training, Lingbao CASBOT adopts an innovative technology route from real to virtual, data synthesis, mixed training, and then from virtual to real. Through the hierarchical end-to-end model and mixed training technology, the robot can become more intelligent, flexible, and autonomous.

When the "body" and "brain" work closely together, the robot gains the ability to perceive, understand, and make decisions at a high level.

CASBOT 01's head has two degrees of freedom and is equipped with multiple sensors such as RGBD cameras, LiDAR, and IMU, enabling dual visual and auditory interaction. Under the operation framework, through end-to-end multimodal dexterous operation large models, distillation and quantization technologies, etc., it successfully realizes the robot hand's generalization and adaptability to the "environment, objects, tasks".

As the end effector for fine operations, CASBOT 01's five-finger bionic dexterous hand weighs 800g per hand and has a rated load of 5kg. It adopts a highly compact overall structure and an integrated drive-sensor-control system bionic design, as well as a multi-source perception system design scheme combining tactile, force, and vision. By optimizing control algorithms and motion planning, it mimics the flexibility of human hands in operation, aiming to solve the difficulties of "dexterity" and "operation" in refined work scenarios. With the strong support of software and hardware, it achieves rapid learning and generalizable long-term dexterous operations.

Scenario feeds back technology, tapping into the hundred billion market

2024 is considered the "first year of commercialization of humanoid robots." A recent report released by the China Humanoid Robot Industry Conference shows that the market size of humanoid robots in China will reach 2.76 billion yuan in 2024 and is expected to grow into a hundred billion yuan market by 2030.

Behind the data lies the dual face of the development of the humanoid robot industry: on the one hand, thanks to its strong industrial penetration and integration capabilities, it has become an important force of "new-quality productivity" and a new pillar driving the high-quality development of China's economy; on the other hand, under the market size of hundred billion yuan, commercialization has become a "must-answer question" for the humanoid robot industry.

In September 2024, Lingbao CASBOT and Lenovo Manufacturing as a Service signed a strategic cooperation agreement, making Lingbao CASBOT one of the first batch of core partner enterprises in Lenovo's "Spark Plan". The two parties have created a new paradigm of "mutual empowerment" cooperation, laying the foundation for the commercialization and application of Lingbao CASBOT's humanoid robot products.

For Lenovo, introducing Lingbao CASBOT's technological innovations in compliant force control and precision operation into Lenovo's smart manufacturing factories can not only enhance production line automation, reduce production costs, and directly inject new vitality into Lenovo's smart factories but also bring breakthrough assistance to Lenovo's smart manufacturing upgrades.

For Lingbao CASBOT, real commercial scenarios can empower technological iteration, and deep cultivation of application scenarios is conducive to future versatility in diverse scenarios, thereby meeting the industry's "universal" demands.

To better serve the market and meet the diverse needs of different industries, Lingbao CASBOT will also open its humanoid robot basic skill library to all industry partners, jointly building a more refined professional skill library, and looks forward to better understanding the needs of different industries, so that humanoid robots and embodied intelligence technology can serve various scenarios and ultimately serve humans.

Continuous iteration, intelligent symbiosis

Just as the theme of the Lingbao CASBOT conference, "Born to Be Human" - this is the vision of Lingbao CASBOT, to unleash human potential through intelligent technology.

At the conference, CASBOT 01 also replaced the host to announce "ONE MORE THING" - "CASBOT NEXT GEN". As an upgraded version of CASBOT 01, it will be equipped with Embodied Brain 2.0, a basic large visual model 2.0, an upgraded general motion prior controller, and a dexterous operation large model, capable of completing full-body motion posture following control and mixed training with human operation video data, achieving a two-way improvement in motion operation.

It is foreseeable that Lingbao CASBOT will continue to be at the forefront of technological innovation and commercial landing scenarios, laying a solid foundation for the "ultimate competition" in the C-end market in the future through continuous cultivation of the B-end market. With step-by-step technological evolution and product validation, it is believed that in the future, Lingbao CASBOT will ultimately realize the future vision of "creating an innovative intelligent species and shaping a new world of intelligent symbiosis".