I’m not sure I’d call this the golden age of humanoid robots, but they sure have been coming out of the woodwork since Tesla announced its intentions to build one back in the summer of 2021. It’s difficult to compare the progress of various systems at the moment (they’re all fairly early stage), but Sanctuary Cognitive Systems Corporate (or the far punchier Sanctuary AI) just hit an important milestone.
The Vancouver, British Columbia, firm just unveiled Phoenix, its own stab at the form factor. The bipedal robot stands 5’7″ and weighs 155 pounds — not dissimilar from the humans it plans to augment (or replace, depending on who you ask). The system is capable of lifting payloads up to 55 pounds and traveling up three miles an hour.
The system sports its own complex hands, with 20 degrees of freedom “that rival human hand dexterity and fine manipulation with proprietary haptic technology that mimics the sense of touch.”
