Walker

Walker is the full-size humanoid UBTech showed at CES 2019, and it is the ancestor of everything the company has built since: the service-oriented Walker X, the industrial Walker S, S1 and S2 that went into BYD and Foxconn plants, and the commercial Walker C. UBTech had demonstrated a legs-only walking prototype a year earlier at CES 2018; the machine described on the company's own product page is the version that spent the following twelve months gaining arms and hands, and it is the first one the maker documents with a full specification sheet. The body stands 145 cm and weighs 77 kg, with 36 degrees of freedom split as six per leg, seven per arm, four per hand and two in the neck. Each joint is an integrated drive unit built from a frameless torque motor, a harmonic reduction gear, a drive controller and dual encoders - the same actuator architecture UBTech still uses. An extended single arm carries 1.5 kg over a 540 mm reach, which places Walker firmly in the demonstration class rather than the load-carrying one: it can pour a drink, open a fridge or hand over an object, but it was never built to move parts around a factory. What the maker emphasises is breadth rather than strength. Walking is planned and controlled well enough to cross carpet, tiles, grass, stairs and slopes; the arms are compliant, so contact with a person is meant to be safe by design rather than by fencing; vision handles navigation, obstacle avoidance and face and object recognition; and the robot exposes a smart-home interface for controlling lights, appliances and sockets. The interaction stack combines text, speech, vision, movement and environmental awareness, which in 2019 was an unusually complete list for a bipedal robot. The electronics are dated in a way that is worth reading as history: two laptop-class Intel processors, an i7-7500U and an i5-6200U, on Ubuntu with the Linux RT Preempt patch, ROS and Android, with URDF and Gazebo for simulation. Power comes from a 54.6 V, 10 Ah lithium iron phosphate pack weighing 6 kg, giving two hours of use for two hours of charging. UBTech never put a price on Walker or sold it; it remained a research and demonstration platform, and its value to the catalogue is that every later Walker is measured against it.

▸Videos

No videos yet.

▸Reviews