Gong Li, vice president of Source Code Capital Investment, said: "Accelerated Evolution is a rare humanoid robot entrants with a full range of hardware, algorithm and commercialization capabilities of the team, focusing on the industry accumulation of technology for more than ten years. We believe that under the leadership of Cheng Hao, accelerated evolution will continue to seize the commanding heights of humanoid robot technology and take the lead in mass production and delivery."
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.
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°.
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."
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.
Previously, "Accelerated Evolution" completed tens of millions of yuan of angel round financing in October 2023.
Investor opinion:
Gong Li, vice president of Source Code Capital Investment, said: "Accelerated Evolution is a rare humanoid robot entrants with a full range of hardware, algorithm and commercialization capabilities of the team, focusing on the industry accumulation of technology for more than ten years. We believe that under the leadership of Cheng Hao, accelerated evolution will continue to seize the commanding heights of humanoid robot technology and take the lead in mass production and delivery."
Yan Siyu, investment director of Shuimu Venture Capital, said: "Humanoid robots may become a disruptive innovation field that changes the state of production and life in the future, benefiting from the breakthrough of large model technology and the rapid iteration of robot core hardware, the evolution of general embodied intelligence has shown us a rich imagination space." Accelerated evolution has a relatively comprehensive robot hardware and software technical capability configuration and a clear commercial operation idea. As a young company, product development has progressed significantly. We are optimistic about the team's deep technical accumulation in the field of robotics and forward-looking understanding of products, and believe that accelerated evolution will become an important leader and definition of the humanoid robot ecology."
Liu Zidi, partner of Yinggang Capital, said: "Humanoid robots with embodied intelligence, as the core product of accelerated evolution, will use its model brain in the future industrial and household scenes, relying on the accelerated evolution of a complete operating system, to achieve true autonomous decision-making, to achieve human-like functions." In order to achieve this purpose, accelerate the evolution of the robot machine research and development and production process, especially pay attention to the full range of humanoid motion control, as well as the construction of hardware and software technology stack, the years of development of humanoid know-how and operation control algorithm precipitation into code, engineering and platform improvement, which is unique at home and abroad, great value."
