Xiaomi has a humanoid robot that walks very, very carefully

Xiaomi has launched a humanoid robot called CyberOne. It can detect human emotion and create 3D visual reconstructions of the world.

It also walks funnily.

In a press release Thursday, the company announced the robot, which is actually a new iteration of an existing "Cyber" series of robots, as Xiaomi also has a quadruped robot called CyberDog.

CyberOne is very different from its dog-like friend. It's 177cm tall and weighs 52kg, and (Xiaomi thought this was important to know) has an arm span of 168cm.

"CyberOne supports up to 21 degrees of freedom in motion and achieves a real-time response speed of 0.5ms for each degree of freedom," Xiaomi says, which allows it to "fully simulate human movements." In a promo video (above), it doesn't appear to be very gracious about it, but at least Xiaomi's willing to make some fun at its own expense. It can also hold up to 1.5kg in weight, so...perhaps it can help you out with groceries?

Xiaomi CyberOne, from the perspective of an oppressed human. Credit: Xiaomi

Xiaomi says CyberOne can perceive 3D space and recognize people, their gestures and expressions. It has an AI-powered "semantics recognition engine" as well as a "vocal emotion identification engine," meaning it can recognize 85 types of environmental sounds and 45 classifications of human emotion. It can comfort you in times of sadness, Xiaomi says. What about those groceries, though?

Jokes aside, it's not entirely clear what Xiaomi plans to do with CyberOne. In a press release, the company said robotics is a "crown jewel of manufacturing," and goes on to explain how complex it was to put all this tech together into a single unit, indicating that the CyberOne, like so many robotics projects today, is mostly a technological showcase. The company did say that the technology applied to CyberOne will trickle into other Xiaomi products in the future, though.

While it's unlikely that any of us will see Xiaomi's robot in our homes or anywhere outside a tech fair anytime soon, it'll be interesting to compare it with Tesla's upcoming, similar-looking humanoid robot, which should be unveiled this September.