The final day of my AI delegation trip through China: legal AI running at 90% accuracy, smart city tech across the board, and humanoids doing substation switching.
Hangzhou City Brain
The Hangzhou City Brain operation centre showed off a huge range of smart city technology:
- AI drafting legal documents and answering council questions at 90% accuracy.
- Hard hats with fall detection built in.
- Cameras monitoring lone workers on site.
- Algorithms working out optimal traffic light sequences to reduce congestion.
Da Feng and Arkasil
Da Feng is focused on the sports, cultural and tourism industry, creating some very innovative performances and shows. They had a robotic arm, Arkasil, with its own range of humanoids and dogs - but the core tech they demonstrated was their operating software.
One of the big things we noticed touring these companies is that the focus is mainly on hardware: making the best base robot or dog. Arkasil instead built the software layer to control as many robots as you like, all through natural language.
Unitree
Unitree was pretty surreal. I’ve been watching their products over the last couple of years, so seeing them in person was something else. Robotic dogs by far have the most use cases when you weigh them against the complexity of human-operated tasks. We aren’t as close to Terminator as I thought.
DEEPRobotics
Then DEEPRobotics. My last role before starting Harkness AI was at an electricity distributor working on AI, so this one hit close to home. I knew about the asset maintenance piece - having a robot walk around to scan and photograph equipment to make sure nothing has degraded.
But they’re also experimenting with a humanoid that lives on a substation and is actually capable of doing the switching and other operations that, until now, only a human could do.
Recap
Terminator is further away than I thought, but robotic dogs are already seeing a huge range of real-world use cases. For the behind-the-scenes videos, check out my Instagram.
This is the final entry in my AI in China series. If you missed it, start back at Day 1 - AI Is Literally Everywhere, or revisit Day 4 - Robot Dogs, Smart Homes and Alibaba’s E-commerce AI.
