Alibaba, Invested in Humanoid Robots

Interactive Dynamics Completes New Round of Strategic Financing

On May 17th, general robotics company Shenzhen Interactive Power Technology Co., Ltd (hereinafter referred to as "Interactive Power") completed a new round of strategic financing, the specific amount has not been disclosed, the investor is Hangzhou Hao Yue Enterprise Management Co.

It is worth noting that Hangzhou Hao Yue is Alibaba (China) Network Technology Co., Ltd. concerted action person company, the shareholders of the two companies shareholding situation is the same: Taobao (China) Software Co., Ltd. shareholding 57.5947%, Zhejiang Tmall Technology Co.

In addition, Hangzhou Hao Yue's legal representative, Hu Xiao, is also the managing director of Alibaba Group's strategic investment department. The bet on by inter-power, marking in the humanoid wave, Ali in the field of intelligent robotics to further deepen the layout.

As a general robotics rookie, by inter-power last year, "ground DJI" product demonstration, 200 million yuan of huge financing, in the network screen, showing strong technical precipitation and development prospects. Ali's capital injection, in addition to replenishing the "ammunitions", will provide financial and industrial support from product landing to technology research, and the two sides are expected to work together to develop commercialized application scenarios, and to promote the development of Embodied AI represented by general-purpose humanoid robots.

Embodied Intelligence "New Force"

Artificial Intelligence has made breakthroughs in natural language processing, computer vision, speech recognition and many other areas, but it still faces many challenges to commercialize and empower production and life scenarios.

At present, most AI systems are still in a "bodyless" state, unable to interact directly with the real world environment. Intelligent systems applied to robots and other physical entities are called "embodied intelligence". It needs to perceive the external environment, understand the semantics and make decisions, and perform tasks through body movement and other aspects of the synergistic cooperation, the computing power, algorithms, hardware and other comprehensive capabilities have put forward extremely high requirements, involving perception, cognition, control and many other technical difficulties, is the development of artificial intelligence to a certain stage will inevitably have to face the "last mileage It is the "last mile" that artificial intelligence will inevitably face when it reaches a certain stage of development.

Humanoid robots are undoubtedly the most intuitive and representative carrier of current embodied intelligence.

In recent years, the rapid development of industrial robots, service robots and other fields, giving rise to the "golden age" of the robotics industry. However, most of the robots belong to the special-purpose type, the degree of intelligence is low, still rely on manual operation or preset program instructions. What Interactive Dynamics strives to do is to make robots "smart" and become "intelligent bodies" that can make decisions and take actions on their own.

Founded in 2022, Interactive Dynamics focuses on the research, development and manufacturing of body-intelligent and foot-type robots, including humanoid bipedal and quadrupedal robots, as well as related hardware and software solutions, focusing on automotive manufacturing, industrial inspection, logistics and distribution, special operations, family services and other B2B and B2C fields.

Although the company was founded a short time, but the technical background can be said to be deep. Founder Zhang Wei graduated from the Department of Automation of China University of Science and Technology as an undergraduate, and then obtained a doctorate degree in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University, and is currently a tenured professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of The Ohio State University, as well as a long-time professor of the Southern University of Science and Technology.

The company's R&D staff accounts for 80% of the company's core team from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Hong Kong, Peking University and other well-known universities at home and abroad, and since 2005 has been cooperating with domestic and international renowned scholars and authoritative organizations to carry out research on cutting-edge technologies of robotics and software algorithms, AI, and has published more than 130 high-level papers in international top journals and conferences.

With solid scientific research foundation and continuous technological innovation, Interdynamic has made a series of breakthroughs in the field of body-mounted intelligent robots.

Adopting a hybrid approach of "Model-based and Learning-based", the company focuses on the breakthroughs in terrain perception and complex terrain adaptability of humanoid bipedal robots, and strives to build a footed robot platform that can move stably on all terrains.

Not long ago, the company released the latest "upgrade" of the four-wheeled foot robot W1 through social media platforms. In the video, W1 can change, change, break the inherent form of the W1, has been able to realize the legs upright action, which is also the first case of "quadruped" into "biped".

In addition, Interdynamics has the world's leading perception-based motion control algorithms, foot robot reinforcement learning algorithms and self-developed high-performance foot joints and other core technologies. Its pioneering "perception-based motion control algorithm", so that the robot to get rid of the limitations of "blind walking", to achieve the first based on real-time terrain perception of the dynamic staircase function.

In addition to excellent technology, the company has also set up a management team with full-stack capabilities, responsible for commercialization, engineering and productization, AI cutting-edge technology and organizational management. Among them, the joining of Li Zhang, former COO of Wenyuan Zhixing, and Dr. Pan Jia, an industry leader in robotics and AI algorithms, will undoubtedly bring new impetus and opportunities to Interactive Dynamics.

During his tenure at Wenyuan Zhixing, Mr. Zhang Li was fully responsible for the company's strategic operations, market development, media relations, as well as the landing operation and cooperation of the drone business in the Chinese market, which was a key task in the process of Wenyuan Zhixing's growth from 0 to 1 and from a startup star to a unicorn. Now, he will be in charge of strategic planning, channel development, marketing and government relations for the domestic and overseas business of Interactive Dynamics, trying to replicate the successful experience in the field of autonomous driving to the field of humanoid robots.

Up to now, the 2-year-old company has completed 3 rounds of financing. In the angel round + Pre-A round of financing in October last year, Oasis Capital and Legend Ventures and other well-known VCs, jointly invested about 200 million yuan for the company, causing widespread discussion in the industry.

This time, Ali's capital support not only injected fresh blood into the company, but also marked a new stage in the development of Interactive Dynamics in the field of robotics. With sufficient financial support, a clear technical route, a top-notch research team, and an experienced commercialization team, Interactive Dynamics is running hard towards the realization of general-purpose AI robots in the real world.

Ali's robotics map

In fact, Alibaba's layout in the field of robotics has a long history.

As early as 2017, Ali set up a consumer robotics company, Tmall Elf; previously invested with Softbank in humanoid robot Pepper; Ali Dharma Academy released a logistics robot in 2020, "Little Barbarian Donkey", and takeaway boys "grabbing a job! "; Ali's Cainiao Logistics is a large-scale deployment of various types of intelligent robots, to enhance the degree of automation of warehousing and logistics plays an important role ......

Ali independent research and development of large language model "Tongyi thousand questions" has also been access to industrial robots, it can be predicted that the future of Ali in the robot perception, decision-making, interaction and other aspects of the arithmetic advantage will continue to enhance.

From the industrial landscape, the robotics industry is experiencing unprecedented changes. The status of traditional industrial robot manufacturers has been shaken, and technology giants have taken the opportunity to cut in and seek disruptive innovation, and they master algorithms, talents and huge scene demand, with the key advantage of reshaping the industry.

Compared to simply engaging in product development, Ali is expected to play a greater role in coordinating the ecological level, whether it is cloud computing, large models, chips or system solutions, Ali can be characterized. How to integrate the ecological chain of resources, through open innovation to empower partners, this will be a key move in the development of Ali robotics business.

For the e-commerce and logistics industry, express delivery, warehousing, automation demand is strong, with the help of robotics efficient and strong collaboration capabilities, is expected to break through the human resources short board, to achieve unprecedented efficiency gains. This investment in inter-by-interactive power is not only a continuation of Ali's encoding of the robotics industry chain, but also adds leverage for Ali in the field of general-purpose AI robots.