WIRobotics has just announced that they have a new plan to build an open development platform for physical AI. The robotics company is well known for manufacturing wearable and humanoid robots. They haven’t just announced it, but have also started making efforts by releasing the simulation model of their humanoid robot. They named it ALLEX. They also shared the results showing how closely the simulation matches a real robot. This process is known as Sim-to-Real testing.

The best part is that the company wants to share all that publicly with robotics engineers and developers. They say that instead of keeping these tools private, they want to make them accessible so that everyone can take part in physical AI development.

It is not a secret now that physical AI is growing faster than ever. Don’t know about physical AI? Well, this is a system that allows robots to interact with the real world physically. These robots can understand what is happening around them and, interestingly, make decisions based on that. Training these robots is a bit complicated. So, to train these robots, developers use a computer simulation before they test them on real robots. This saves a lot of their time and, of course, reduces the cost too.

WIRobotics believes that once they make these things accessible, it will speed up the research process. This will allow developers to build and test AI models in virtual settings. Even if they don’t have access to ALLEX, they can still do it on their own.

ALLEX is the first release in WIRobotics’ new technology roadmap. It is capable of copying the movements of a real humanoid robot. Not only this, but it can also closely monitor its behaviour. So, what is the goal here? It is to reduce the difference between what happens in a simulation and what happens when the same software is used on a real robot.

Researchers can carry out experiments without having a need for physical equipment. The reason is very clear. Virtual models perform almost the same as actual robots, so there is no need for physical equipment.

WIRobotics is continuously adding more to it. They have released the model in various file formats. The reason is to support various robotic software. Want to know what platforms they currently support? Well, it includes MJCF for MuJoCo, USD for Isaac Sim, and URDF for ROS.

They say that this simulation is just the beginning. They have plans to keep releasing more technologies over time. Their goal is simple: to grow their open Physical AI community gradually.

Co-Chief Executive Officer of WIRobotics, Yong-Jae Kim, said that simulation has a great role in the development process of humanoid robots. This provides a real foundation for AI learning and testing. He further said that it becomes easier when the simulation is working fine by closely matching the real robot. This helps developers test more ideas successfully. He said that the company plans to make the ALLEX research platform available later this year.

He said that the purpose behind the release of the simulation was to allow developers to test new technologies before the robot becomes widely available.

He added that the company wants to keep growing this ecosystem so that research done now can eventually be used on real robots.