Technology war to show Mass production

The race for humanoid robots is becoming so intense that the disputes are now leaving the laboratories and are avoiding the most chaotic possible scenario in an advertising war, and the most recent case involves two giants of the sector, the Chinese UBTECH and the American Figura in a confrontation that began with a heavy accusation, “Your video is fake.”

It all started when Brett Adcock, CEO of Figure, published a series of posts directly criticizing UBTECH's video, which celebrated its first mass delivery of humanoid robots to the world, I made a post about it and you can see it here; But to sum it up in the video, hundreds of Walker S2s lined up in a warehouse seemed to form a real robotic army, but according to Brett Adcock, that was too good to be true.

He pointed out an intriguing detail, the reflections of the overhead lights on the robots' heads. For Brett Adcock, only the robot in front was real and all the others would have been created by computer graphics, in other words, a fraud, “look at the reflections, what is in the back is not real,” he wrote, was enough to ignite the discussion.

And UBTECH's response came quickly and the video, the company published apparently continuous and uncut images, filmed by a drone flying over real rows of Walker S2s assembled in an industrial warehouse, the legend was a direct message to the critics, in quotes, they said it seemed too perfect to be real. “Perfection is not manufactured, it is designed.”

This new video was a clear effort to demonstrate that Mass production is not only real, but happening right now, but there is a larger context here and it explains why this discussion went viral so quickly, Brett Adcock has a history of aggressive criticism in the industry. He called the videos of the also American OneX misleading and then claimed that his compatriot Agility Robotics went bankrupt in less than 12 months due to poor engineering decisions.

This time, however, he did not attack a strategy, he attacked the authenticity of a competitor's hardware and that is a line that few cross, if the UBTECH video is 100% authentic as it seems to me to be, the company takes the lead in one of the most difficult stages of this dispute, leaving the prototype and entering the production line.

If there is any proven manipulation in these videos, the blow to their credibility could be fatal.