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Eunice Xu

US software company OpenMind, according to founder and CEO Jan Liphardt, caused a commotion last year at a park in San Francisco where the firm shot a promotional video.
“A crowd of people came, children came running, cars stopped and the police came,” he said, because “there was a robot in the park”.
In an interview, Liphardt told the South China Morning Post that such a scenario would have been treated differently on the other side of the world. “If a [Unitree] G1 walked across the street in Shanghai, people do not stop. They’ve seen this before.”
That contrast highlighted the opportunity for OpenMind – developer of the OM1 open-source and artificial intelligence-native operating system for robots – to serve as a bridge to the rest of the world for China’s humanoid robot makers.
China is “unquestionably ahead” of the US in robotics hardware, according to Liphardt, citing its mature integrated supply chain and intense domestic competition.
He said OpenMind already worked with several Chinese companies – including Unitree Robotics, UBTech Robotics, AgiBot, LimX Dynamics, Booster Robotics and Engine AI – as these firms turned their attention to overseas markets.
Chinese robotics firms now have a “significant presence” in Silicon Valley, according to Liphardt, who is also a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University.
Collaboration between OpenMind and Chinese robot makers is expected to reduce the barriers to entry for these firms to sell in the US, he said.

He pointed out that using software developed and hosted in the US, where local data and cloud operations reside, would help Chinese hardware makers mitigate regulatory hurdles.
The CEO’s belief, according to OpenMind’s website, was simple: “If we’re going to live with machines, we should know how they think – and we should help them think better.”
OM1’s hardware-agnostic feature allows it to work across quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled robots and drones.
The operating system fuses multimodal data – including vision, audio and spatial inputs – into a model to determine a robot’s actions and then translates those decisions into hardware commands, according to Liphardt.
Liphardt said OpenMind focused on situations where robots “directly interact with humans”, such as in retail, hospitals and schools.
He was also adamant that OpenMind would not enter the industrial sector. “That ship has sailed,” he said, citing the mature adoption of industrial robots by firms like Amazon.com.
Supporting flashy humanoid movements like doing front flips, which involve tight hardware integration, was also not a focus of OpenMind, he said.

OpenMind’s collaboration with Chinese robotics firms also extended to marketing, according to Gavin Wong, the San Francisco-based company’s head of marketing.
While many Chinese robotics firms are now in the market, they often lack a strong following or significant brand awareness in the West, he said.
“The content that they make is vastly different from the content that we make,” Wong said, adding that their partnership could support these firms’ marketing efforts to reach a global audience.
Liphardt has high hopes for a world in which humans and robots coexist. He acknowledged, however, that there was still a long way to go.
“At least in the US, we’re still in this phase of most people meeting a humanoid for the first time,” he said. “Just the presence of a humanoid … that’s walking around is fascinating to people.”


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Software connection: US firm opens doors for global adoption of China’s humanoid robots

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OpenMind works with several Chinese robotics companies including Unitree, UBTech, AgiBot and Engine AI


OpenMind works with several Chinese robotics companies including Unitree, UBTech, AgiBot and Engine AI.


Software connection: US firm opens doors for global adoption of China’s humanoid robots

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}OpenMind works with several Chinese robotics companies including Unitree, UBTech, AgiBot and Engine AI

OpenMind works with several Chinese robotics companies including Unitree, UBTech, AgiBot and Engine AI