Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unitree As2-W

unitree.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 75 posts

Re: Unitree As2-W

#61

Post by toomuchtodo »

naveen99 wrote: post #58
echelon wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need open source versions of these. 1. We need the capability to build the servos, actuators, etc. Supply chain, factories, specialized vendors. 2. We need to dump the firmware, decompile it, extract the models, and liberate it all. AI will help immensely with that. We can literally hijack everything software that isn't delivered over cloud now - so this is the easy part. We can then fine tune, adapt to new tasks,…

You can’t raise money for theft / piracy. Just have your claw guide you through the hardware.

You can create a bounty through a nonprofit foundation, and use donations that are tax deductible to fund reverse engineering and creating an open version under an open license that defends against commercial capture.

This is one of the superpowers of LLMs and generative AI I think, providing cheap reverse engineering superpowers to clean room reimplement proprietary and closed systems as open source systems. Fiat, tokens, and context goes in, technology sovereignty comes out. In the same way people talk about a software factory, think about a reverse engineering factory. You are laundering the knowledge and tradecraft embodied in artifacts, both digital and physical, through model training and inference.

Open hardware developed by the above process can be produced by contract hardware manufacturers or someone CrowdSupply facilitates. If an expert opinion is needed on this, I’d recommend Andrew Huang of bunnie studios.

https://bounties.fulu.org/

https://www.fulu.org/

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/20/cheap-reverse-engineer...

https://www.bunniestudios.com/

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

(think in systems)

Re: Unitree As2-W

#62

Post by sterlind »

arjie wrote: post #16
syntaxing wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, you can’t use their SDK or you can’t load whatever you want on it?

E.g. Unitree R1 has attractive low price but missing the “secondary development” pack (access to Jetson Orin and all the firmware stuff to let you run custom software). It’s all just their software. Useless tool. Click button and it dances. Then what.

howc hard is it to jailbreak the device?

Re: Unitree As2-W

#63

Post by saturn8601 »

xyzsparetimexyz wrote: post #39
saturn8601 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese work ethic driven by overproduction of STEM majors leading to 25% youth unemployment...also they probably stole a lot of the fundamental stuff that was super hard to produce but easy to copy and build on top of. On the other side: Years of VC focusing on the next great app to make you some cooked eggs instead of investing in companies operating in the physical world.

Idk about work ethic, but what are the chances it's a 996 company?

All Chinese companies are 996 companies and any that arent will eventually be replaced by a 996 company. Again vast oversupply of STEM labor serves as a forcing function(but is not the only reason).

Re: Unitree As2-W

#64

Post by saturn8601 »

bijowo1676 wrote: post #28
saturn8601 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese work ethic driven by overproduction of STEM majors leading to 25% youth unemployment...also they probably stole a lot of the fundamental stuff that was super hard to produce but easy to copy and build on top of. On the other side: Years of VC focusing on the next great app to make you some cooked eggs instead of investing in companies operating in the physical world.

I often hear about "muh china stealing", two questions come to mind: 1. how could they steal something that western companies dont even have yet? 2. for more fundamental stuff, western companies did transfer knowledge themselves by moving factories to China, in exchange for decades of access to China market and exorbitant profits they earned. Where exactly is "supposed stealing" in unitree ?

Boston Dynamics has been at the game for a LONG time (1992 vs Unitree's 2016). During that time they slogged through a lot of fundamental work that from the outside looked like 0 but thats the thing about tech, it starts at 0.01% then increases 0.01% → 0.02% → 0.04% → 0.08% → 0.16% → 0.32% → 0.64% and so on. The world just sees 0 until they don't. If you are able to just take all the results of those years and skip the same effort required then combined with your own skilled and motivated people you can leapfrog them.

(Im basically rewording my original comment, you didn't get my point the first time)

Re: Unitree As2-W

#65

Post by rasz »

numpad0 wrote: post #50
walrus01 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that now, but wait until one of these is charging at you across a field with a QBZ-95 strapped to its back and a 1024 resolution thermal sensor.

I'd be more scared of MQ-9 dropping a JDAM or R9X on my head than this thing running around. They're proven to be undetectable to human targets. That's scarier to me than this thing running around catching wires and bushes.

mq9 ~$20m price tag will buy a LOT of robodogs with machine guns able to exterminate disproportionally more people per $ and time unit.

Re: Unitree As2-W

#66

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

walrus01 wrote: post #48
numpad0 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no use for these robots(even militarily). It's very high tech, but that's it.

You say that now, but wait until one of these is charging at you across a field with a QBZ-95 strapped to its back and a 1024 resolution thermal sensor.

Not this robot. You can see that none of the videos where the robot is careering downhill or rolling fast over rough terrain shows it carrying any load at all. Since those are the best-of, carefully curated videos, painstakingly chosen to show off the system's capabilities at its best you can rest assured that the robot can't manoeuvre like shown in the videos with any load at all.

There's a video where it's going uphill over uneven terrain with a load at a much slower pace, which is the same as what Big Dog could do 21 years ago, and another one where it's shown rolling up a smooth, grassy slope while loaded, which is pretty meh.

And that's just carrying a load. Now, you want it to carry an assault rifle and fire it? Like, at enemy targets? And hit them?

You will need to wait for a couple of major breakthroughs in robotics and AI still, I'm afraid.

Re: Unitree As2-W

#67

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

dyauspitr wrote: post #53
numpad0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be more scared of MQ-9 dropping a JDAM or R9X on my head than this thing running around. They're proven to be undetectable to human targets. That's scarier to me than this thing running around catching wires and bushes.

I’m just a regular person and even I can see use for this where it carries all my gear on a very long hike or when I go camping. I’m sure that alone would be extremely valuable to any military. Also, not everything is aerially accessible. Lots of tight spaces in urban combat where you need to get get inside structures and interact with physical things like doors that drones just don’t have the physical strength for a…

Guys, guys:

>> High Payload:

>> Static 150 kg;

>> Continuous walking payload approx. 16 kg

And on top of that:

>> Long Endurance:

>> Unloaded 3h+ (>33 km);

>> Loaded > 2h (>16 km)

16 kgs for two hours max is not "extremely valuable to any military". It's hardly even valuable to a leisure camper. You might be able to get this to carry some of your stuff if you go on a short hike, but if you were thinking of going camping and having it carry your camping gear, you can forget about it.

Re: Unitree As2-W

#68

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

throw310822 wrote: post #36
numpad0 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no use for these robots(even militarily). It's very high tech, but that's it.

You wait until they mount them with a chainsaw.

Or five. One on each leg and one ON THE FACE!

And then a tiny little one on the bum like a cutesy tail <3

Re: Unitree As2-W

#69

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

walrus01 wrote: post #43
Aboutplants wrote: post #4

This is way more of what I thought robotics companies should be working on over their dumb 4 legged dog like robots. Wheels were invented for a reason and we are awfully good at moving things around on them at speed. Combining multiple attributes into a single form will ultimately prove to be the winning formula. Just like in a year or two you will start to see more appendages than just two arms on humanoids.

> Wheels were invented for a reason Literally we have a very old saying that is "don't reinvent the wheel" and yet people persist in doing so, when an already near optimal design exists. I'm not saying don't do anything new and novel but that if a large portion of the design has already been done for you and you can improve it, like this company has done (wheels on the end of legs!), why not try that first and see if…

There are so many places wheels can't go and legs can. For example, most rough terrain is right out of the question for anyone using a wheelchair. There are all-terrain wheelchairs that can go over some rough terrain but you just can't move across the same range of terrains with wheels that you can with legs. Even Mars rovers have to carefully avoid areas of e.g. deep sand where they can get stuck etc (and they still get stuck occasionally like Spirit†). Hence also all the specialised wheel designs like tank treads.

If it were possible to make legged robots with the same fine motor control and dexterity as human legs, let alone four-legged animals' legs, we'd be way ahead of where we are right now in mobile robotics. We can't.

Re: Unitree As2-W

#70

Post by Terretta »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #67
dyauspitr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m just a regular person and even I can see use for this where it carries all my gear on a very long hike or when I go camping. I’m sure that alone would be extremely valuable to any military. Also, not everything is aerially accessible. Lots of tight spaces in urban combat where you need to get get inside structures and interact with physical things like doors that drones just don’t have the physical strength for a…

Guys, guys: >> High Payload: >> Static 150 kg; >> Continuous walking payload approx. 16 kg And on top of that: >> Long Endurance: >> Unloaded 3h+ (>33 km); >> Loaded > 2h (>16 km) 16 kgs for two hours max is not "extremely valuable to any military". It's hardly even valuable to a leisure camper. You might be able to get this to carry some of your stuff if you go on a short hike, but if you were thinking of going camp…

An industrial 15000 mwh 50v lithium pack can run 3 kg, so you could bring 8 hours of spare walking and a solar panel…
Post reply on HN