Not long ago, at a business forum, a unique Peking Opera performance and a majestic Arabic sword dance won the applause of the entire audience. These agile dancers are a group of humanoid robots. The robots from China Data Robotics Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Data") can demonstrate smooth movements with steel limbs, which cannot be achieved without the breakthrough of flexible joint technology. Conquering flexible joint technology, robot movements are precise and smooth. Although robots have been developed for over half a century, their movements are still slow and clumsy in basic human activities such as handing a cup of water and feeding a mouthful of food. Making machines move like humans is the goal of many robotics companies around the world. Among them, the motion of robot joints is a technical difficulty. Whether on the way to work or in the gym, we observe people's shoulders and arms, pondering the structural force lines of joints. To break through the bottleneck, the company's R&D personnel are fully committed to it Huang Xiaoqing, founder of Data, recalled that after its establishment in 2015, the company's first goal in the research and development of intelligent robot hardware was to conquer flexible joint technology. Zhang Rongrong, a R&D personnel at Data, said, "Taking the hand as an example, the joints on the hand are the most concentrated and difficult to imitate. Random human movements require the coordination of numerous joints and complex and precise automation control." The company's R&D personnel found that human joints have strong resilience characteristics when landing. Can flexibility be achieved by simulating the soft areas of the knee and ankle joints? Following this approach, researchers believe that in order to achieve biological joint characteristics, a series of elastic driving joints with variable stiffness are needed. This is a disruptive approach, and architecture designed using traditional methods is difficult to implement. Huang Xiaoqing gained inspiration from his experience in developing smartphones. Smartphone chips and screens are rapidly iterating in use, and can joint components become increasingly lightweight and usable through continuous intelligent iteration and optimization? Following this approach, the R&D team integrated originally independent components and reduced their size to 1/10 of traditional servo systems, just like when chips were integrated on a single circuit board. Communication, computing, sensing and other technologies have been introduced, and electronic hardware, nested software, and intelligent algorithms have been comprehensively applied in them. Behind a simple action of a robot, there is a comprehensive ability of perception, decision-making, and execution. Through unremitting exploration and experimentation, under the intelligent collaboration of multiple flexible joints, the robot movements produced by Data have become increasingly precise and smooth. Placing the robot's "brain" in the cloud to provide more powerful computing power. At the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Tata's embodied robot "Xiaojiang", which combines multiple artificial intelligence technologies, made its debut, with 34 intelligent flexible joints achieving smoother sensing, computation, and decision-making responses. It can dance flexibly to the music and also complete high difficulty threading. The exhibition booth of Data Beijing headquarters is filled with mechanical joints, and through the robot's "skeleton", biomimetic shoulders, necks, elbows, wrists can be clearly seen... Huang Xiaoqing introduced that the team is constantly researching in the field of intelligent flexible joints, integrating motors, drivers, and encoders together, and continuously optimizing motors and algorithms, cooperating with the robot's "brain", step by step expanding more diverse functions and application scenarios. Intelligent flexible joints make service robots more practical in various scenarios, while placing their "brains" in the cloud enables distributed deployment of critical data processing and intelligent computing, providing stronger performance computing power and facilitating intelligent upgrades. The foundation of the manufacturing industry provides strong support, and the new ecological chain industry chain is cultivating the support of the manufacturing industry, enabling the rapid industrialization of Data's new technologies. Relying on the relatively mature manufacturing foundation in China, the lighter and more compact motors needed by the company were quickly produced. The mature precision manufacturing industry has helped the company improve the stability of motors and achieve higher output power. The Data Intelligent Robot Industry Base has been in operation for less than 3 years, and over 100 robot companies and research institutes have used various types of robots produced by the company. Through the large-scale production of intelligent flexible joints, the cost of key components for this robot has been greatly reduced, with a production capacity of 400000 sets by 2023. New ecological and industrial chains are being cultivated, and hundreds of medical enterprises, research institutions, and robot manufacturers are currently using Data's standardized modules. Yang Guanghua, co-founder of Data, said that relying solely on one's own innovation ability and scenario development has limited potential, and it is necessary to collaborate with "partner forces" to build a more complete innovation system. Data shows that the company currently has over 300 application partners and 100 device partners, opening up over 3000 robot skill models and creating over 3500 digital twin maps. At present, Data flexible robots have been widely used in frontline mechanical manufacturing, aerospace, medical and other fields. The pioneering experiments in manufacturing and people's livelihood application scenarios will drive continuous breakthroughs in key robot technologies. Like Data, many domestic companies are deeply involved in the research and development of humanoid robots, which often bring surprises. With the continuous development of artificial intelligence technology, the humanoid robot industry is expected to reach a market size of trillions of yuan. (Lai Xin She)