A Chinese startup has unveiled a child-sized robot capable of performing continuous backflips.
Beijing-based Noetix Robotics built the N2 humanoid bot to serve as a budget-friendly robot assistant, with an estimated price tag of 39,000 yuan (£4,100).
The 1.3-metre-tall bot is bipedal and capable of travelling at speeds of up to 11 kilometres per hour across rough terrain.
Noetix Robotics said the robot comes equipped with an advanced Nvidia Jetson Orin chip that give it “powerful perception and interaction capabilities”.
The generative AI gives it the ability to communicate in a similar way to ChatGPT-style chatbots, while pre-trained models allow it to perform simple human tasks.
The Startup’s website features images that show a different version of the robot attending family gatherings and pushing an elderly person in a wheel chair.
A video showing the robot performing a backflip appears to serve only as a demonstration of the robot’s balance and agility.
“Longer front feet and shorter back feet [means] the inertia makes it easier to fall on the back when performing a backflip,” said Jiang Zheyuan, a technical leader at Noetix Robotics, who led the development of the robot.
“In a frontflip, the long front feet make it harder to fall forward. Therefore, doing a backflip is slightly harder than doing a frontflip.”
Noetix Robotics has also recently demonstrated a robot head capable of mimicking over 30 human facial expressions.
The robots are part of a massive push by Chinese companies to mass produce robots in order to fill various roles, from household chores, to industrial applications like factory workers.
China is already the largest industrial robot market in the world, according to data from the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), accounting for more than half of all robot installations worldwide.
The country’s industrial robot market was valued at $6.3 billion last year, according to separate figures from market research firm Fortune Business Insights, and is projected to grow to more than $20bn by 2032.
