36 KR learned that recently, the humanoid robot company “accelerated evolution” completed tens of millions of yuan Pre-A round of financing, led by source capital, Shuimu Venture Capital and Yinggang Capital followed. This round of financing will be used for small batch production and marketing, talent recruitment, and continuous R&D iterations.

Accelerated Evolution is a humanoid robotics company, founded in 2023, which will provide developers with stable humanoid robots and efficient development tools, unite developers around the world, and drive productivity change.

CI857K01 In Accelerated Evolution’s recently released product demo, its humanoid robot BR002 can stand up from lying on the ground with its legs folded backwards, in the same way that humanoid robot pioneer Boston Dynamics’ electric-powered humanoid robot Atlas stands up.

The accelerated evolution of the robot is able to quickly replicate the movements of the Boston Dynamics robot because the company decided early on to adopt a configuration that mimics the human leg and a unique joint layout at the hip that allows for 360° rotation, which coincides with Boston Dynamics. Compared with quadruped, bird leg, simplified leg, etc., the motion control algorithm of human leg configuration is extremely difficult, but it has a higher upper limit in motion ability. The accelerated evolution of humanoid robots can do lateral splits, longitudinal splits, a very large range of motion, the joint can rotate 360°.

CI857K01

Accelerating the evolution of humanoid robots

Cheng Hao, founder of Accelerated Evolution, said that in the early stage of development, the company focused on building the cerebellum and hardware body of humanoid robots, and the current task is to achieve mass production, first run the business model, and then make efforts on the computing unit and robot operating system.

“What we are good at now is the ontology and the cerebellum, but I think the next barrier is not the brain, the cerebellum, the ontology, but the operating system and the computing unit.” The robot of the future must have its own computing unit, the SoC chip. The other side is the [operational] system, and robots will definitely have systems and development tools in the future so that other developers can do secondary development on top of it.”

CI857K01 Humanoid robots can be divided into brain, cerebellum in charge of motion control and hardware body. At present, accelerated evolution comes from the cerebellum and hardware ontology. In the aspect of motion control, the barrier of humanoid operation control products is very high, the solution involves a lot of physical and mathematical principles, the operation control algorithm is complex, the self-developed configuration is scarce, and the forward development is difficult. The complexity of software engineering is also very high, the decoupling is difficult, and the layered packaging is a lot of software challenges.

The founder of the company, Cheng Hao, is a graduate of Tsinghua University, and has been vice president of Byte-Ren Fei book products; Zhao Mingguo, a researcher in the Department of Automation of Tsinghua University, director of the Center of Brain Robot of the Robot Control Laboratory and the Center of Unmanned Systems, is the chief scientist of the company.

Accelerated Evolution has built a team with one of the industry’s few full capabilities in robotics, software, and commercialization, and has been working on productizing humanoid robots since Day 1.

The company plans to officially release its humanoid robot products equipped with the operation control algorithm development platform in the second half of this year, and begin to carry out small batch production and sales.