European robotics company Neura Robotics says that its third-generation 4NE-1 humanoid robot will launch in June of this year, and that it should be the best robot on the market at that point. That’s a very bold statement in a space that has seen unprecedented levels of innovation at high speed in the past few months. But given recent geopolitical shifts between Europe and the USA, it’s also incredibly necessary for European competitiveness in an emerging world of ever-increasing automation.
“It should be the best robot on the market,” Neura Robotics CEO David Reger told me recently on the TechFirst podcast. “I’m super excited to show something in June, which will actually beat also all the other humanoids on this planet.”
That’s a very, very tall order indeed.
To be sure, 4NE-1 is an impressive robot. (And yes, its name is intended to convey that the robot is actually for anyone.) 4NE-1 is just under six feet tall and weighs in at 176 pounds. The current model can carry about 35 pounds and move at just under two miles per hour, though both are likely to improve in the third generation. 4NE-1 has 3D vision to sense its environment, special sensors to detect humans and avoid collisions, and force-torque sensors to give it a sense of touch. It runs autonomously and has exchangeable forearms so it can be customized to specific jobs and purposes.
What really makes 4NE-1 impressive, however, is its intelligence. Specifically, how its intelligence has been designed and implemented in a three-layer cognition cake that is shockingly similar to how humans feel, react, think, and process.
Think about it: sometimes, when you touch something like a hot stove, you react almost instantly, instinctively. Your reaction doesn’t require thought or processing: it’s instinctive, generated from your spinal cord, not your brain. That makes it super fast.
Some tougher challenges, like picking a route from your car to the grocery store front door, involve higher-level functions in your brain. And some are beyond even our deepest musing, so we consult other people’s intelligence in persona or online, in Wikipedia, one social media, or with AI systems like ChatGPT.
There’s something oddly similar built into Neura Robotics’ 4NE-1.
A first layer in its “skin,” or in a charging port for example, uses a very distributed LLM-based AI model with just five or six million parameters to sense and react immediately. A second layer, in the chest of the humanoid robot, uses a 500-600 million parameter AI engine to understand the world around and compute next actions. And then there’s a third layer in the cloud with perhaps 10 billion parameters for the toughest challenges.
The goal is intelligence at the level needed that is available as quickly as, well, inhumanly possible.
“If you really want to have a humanoid robot or just any kind of robot doing some smart task, having knowledge about a situation, you need to have these different layers,” says Reger. “And that’s the only way of being really reactive and moving in this physical world.”
While Reger’s claim about the gen-3 4NE-1 is a big one, he isn’t completely making claims in a void.
Neura Robotics is not his first robotics company and it’s not a brand-new startup. Neura has been making robots–cognitive robots, Reger emphasizes–since 2019. The company has multiple products in market already, including tethered robotic arms like the MAiRA, a skate-like equipment and load-moving robot named MAV which can move up to 3,300 pounds, plus a wheeled delivery robot that is currently at the prototype phase.
4NE-1 will also have a revolutionary type of “skin” which is critical to solve Reger’s vision of robots working directly with humans in the real world. And his vision of them working at a reasonable speed.
“People get impressed every time they’re coming visiting me, and I let 4NE-1 fill up my glass, but I don’t get impressed at all,” Reger says. “I’m super annoyed by my robot.”
Why?
Robots are typically slow, particularly robots that are designed to work in close proximity to humans. They are designed to move slowly, Reger says, because they don’t want to risk injuring a human.
How do you solve that problem?
Reger says the answer is skin. Skin that senses touch and has “superhuman sensors” to anticipate touch as well as compute pressure accurately. With that as a safety layer against hitting a human, a robot can move much quicker.
“Then you can actually have a completely different approach of how you control the robot next to a human,” says Reger. “And this is actually one of the most important topics we work on.”
Neura has also invented a new actuator that will allow 4NE-1 to move incredibly quckly and powerfully–much like Boston Dynamic’s hydraulics-driven parkour robots–but using electricity. Reger believes it’s the best actuator available today.
All of this is good and exciting, but there’s a ton of competition out there.
Figure plans to ship an astounding 100,000 humanoid robots over the next four years, and Agility Robots already has its robots working in customers’ factories and fulfillment centers. Beyond that, there are something like 100 companies making humanoid robots all over the world, and at least 16 with a significant existing product, vision, and capital to potentially make it happen.
So we’ll believe Neura’s claims when we see the gen-3 4NE-1 humanoid robot in action.
One thing that is clear already, however, is that Europe needs its own humanoid robots to compete in an increasingly automated future. In Peter Diamandis’ recent report on humanoid robots, he didn’t see too many companies doing interesting things in humanoids in Europe. Most are in the USA or China, with one in the UK and one in Canada.
That’s a problem, if you’re European.
Efficient, effective, and reasonably-priced humanoid robots will turn the world upside down. Manufacturing, logistics, maintenance, health care, elder care, deliveries … most major industries would be impacted, and countries with higher levels of implementation could see massive productivity jumps.
Which makes solving humanoid robots mission-critical for any country.
Reger fully understand that:
“We are not just not allowed to miss this train,” he says. “f you’re going to miss robotics, Europe will have super huge issues in the future because that’s the only thing we don’t have under control yet, because we don’t have a solution, we don’t have an answer on this issue.”
In fact, it’s almost an existential crisis, Reger says.
“Europe without robotics is like … I would say it’s not possible to exist because there is no real need of Europe anymore as it was before,” he says. “Because we were always known for our amazing cars, our amazing technologies, machines, which we built, and this time is kind of not over yet, but it could have an end if we are missing this train of automation.”
Especially in an era of tariff wars and buy-local campaigns.
