AI robots couldn’t let us keep our vanity to ourselves. They’re now hitting the gym, too — but the reps they’re getting in aren’t of the weightlifting kind.
Enter Neura, a buzzy robotics startup in Metzingen, Germany, that is positioning itself at the forefront of embodied AI by training these advanced systems to inhabit and navigate the real world.
According to a new piece from the New York Times, the heart of its operations is its secretive “robogym” facility in Munich, where up to one hundred humanoids from companies around the world constantly practice and perform tasks — from chores to factory work — so they can get better at them.
The NYT described the scene, in the first time a journalist has been given access to the facility: “The robots picked up car parts and placed them into containers, stacked boxes and carried out other tasks, mimicking the movements of human trainers who guided them remotely. One robot practiced tightening its grip on a glass, learning how to respond when water is added.”
Large language models can draw on existing data, from internet posts to books, to “learn” about the world. But the equivalent corpus of data doesn’t exist for the physical world, so it has to be created and collected.
Neura founder David Reger likened it to learning to swim, telling the NYT that you can’t simply watch videos; you have to get in the water.
Having recently raised up to $1.4 billion from the likes of Nvidia and Amazon in a June funding round, Neura is gunning to become something like the Gold’s Gym of the robo world. By the end of next year, per the NYT, it plans to operate five gyms across the globe. It already has one in Hangzhou, China, one of the country’s major tech hubs.
It’s a leader in the West, but it’s playing catch up with Chinese competitors, who altogether already run more than 90 humanoid data collection centers, according to data from the consulting firm Interact Analysis, while Europe only has ten.
Currently, most robots used in factories are specialized for specific tasks. Humanoid robots aim to be versatile like a real employee, but are harder to pull off. There’s still huge questions over their, but the idea seems to making some headway, with BMW preparing to trial robotsfrom the Swiss company Hexagon Robotics on the factory floor. Japan Airlines is also experimenting with robot baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Haneda airport, who presumably have had plenty of time to hit the gym.
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