Apple researchers have revealed how they use a Mac mini to control a Unitree humanoid robot to navigate rooms it has never seen before. It’s really quite remarkable.
The robot can see the table and realize it needs to crouch to get under it – image credit: Apple.
The robot can see the table and realize it needs to crouch to get under it – image credit: Apple.
Leakers claiming that a future HomeView will have a robot arm didn’t envisage anything like this. A team of researchers from Apple has published a paper detailing how they trained a Unitree G1 “humanoid” robot using an M4 Pro Mac mini with 64GB RAM.
Apple’s “Perceptive Humanoid Motion from Simulation” paper describes a system called “Humanoid Autonomy, Learned in Simulation, running Onboard,” or HALO. The paper and its accompanying video show the Unitree G1 able to analyze rooms. It can follow someone if instructed, it can navigate obstacles, and when told to sit, determine where a chair is.