"Daemon Robotics" has successfully completed two consecutive rounds of hundred-million-yuan Angel+ rounds of financing, focusing on the research and development of optical tactile sensors and their embodied intelligent systems. | 36Kr Exclusive
Written by Tian Zhe
Edited by Su Jianxun
36Kr has learned that Damon Robotics recently announced the completion of two consecutive rounds of angel + financing of over 100 million yuan, jointly invested by Jinding Capital, Guozhong Capital, Lenovo Capital and leading bank-based investment institutions. The funds from this round of financing will be mainly used for the research and development of products and technologies such as optical tactile sensors, dexterous tactile hands, and multimodal perception and operation models with tactile perception.
Damon Robotics officially started operations in August 2023. It was co-founded by Professor Wang Yu, the founding dean of the Robotics Institute at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Dr. Duan Jianghua. The company is committed to the research and development of optical tactile sensors, enabling the robot's fingertips to accurately perceive multimodal tactile information including three-dimensional force, kinesthesia, and slip, just like a human. Currently, the Damon Robotics team has more than 30 members, with the R & D personnel accounting for more than 80%.
The market size of humanoid robots is huge. According to market forecasts, the global humanoid robot market space will exceed 10 trillion yuan, and the global humanoid robot market size will reach nearly 100 billion yuan in 2030.
However, there is still a certain distance for humanoid robots to achieve large-scale mass production. Duan Jianghua, the founder and CEO of Damon Robotics, told 36Kr that humanoid robots must have the ability to complete various tasks in order to truly accelerate the development of the industry.
However, relying solely on visual perception is not enough for robots to accurately understand the physical world and interact efficiently. Although visual perception can improve the robot's object recognition and environmental understanding capabilities, it is easily affected by occlusion, lacks tactile perception feedback, and the existing data magnitude is difficult to train a general AI for robots, resulting in limited hand operation capabilities of robots, and most only have a simple grasping function.
For this reason, Damon Robotics has developed a millimeter-level thickness visual-tactile sensor, reducing the sensor thickness from the centimeter level to the millimeter level. It can not only be easily placed inside the robot's fingers but also enhances the robot's perception ability of the outside world.
Duan Jianghua introduced that there are about 2,400 tactile receptors per square centimeter of skin on the human fingertip, while the visual-tactile sensor of Damon Robotics has a tactile resolution of pixel-level resolutions of 640*480 and 1280*960, with hundreds of thousands of tactile receptors in a unit area. "The resolution of traditional array-type tactile sensors is only a few by a few per square centimeter, which has a difference of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of times compared to the visual-tactile sensor. The higher the resolution, the more subtle the spatial perception of the tactile sense." Duan Jianghua said.
The dexterous hand of Damon Robotics
Therefore, the optical tactile sensor can not only be applied to humanoid robots but also to surgical robots, intelligent cockpits, flexible material processing and assembly, and other scenarios. Currently, the optical tactile sensor of Damon Robotics has been produced in small batches and put into application.
The high value of tactile perception is not only reflected in the execution of actions but also plays an important role in the end-to-end model learning and logical reasoning of robots. In order to make the robot "learn" dexterous operation skills, Damon Robotics integrates tactile perception with vision, actions, and other data to establish a vision-tactile-action-language model, enabling the robot to adjust the operation in real-time according to tactile and visual feedback to complete fine tasks more efficiently.
Another difficulty in the large-scale application of humanoid robots is the need to collect a large amount of training data from the real world. In the past, training methods based on conventional modalities such as vision, language, and body posture, such as teleoperation and hardware sensors, have an extremely large demand for data.
It is reported that after integrating tactile perception, the data volume required for the operation model of Damon Robotics can be reduced to one-thousandth of the conventional method at the lowest, which can increase the types of tasks that the robot can complete, improve the success rate, and reduce the data demand.
Duan Jianghua said that in order to improve the efficiency and quality of data collection, Damon Robotics has developed a set of data collection exoskeletons. It does not rely on the robot body. After the data collector wears it on the body, they only need to complete a series of actions in daily work and life. The tactile sensor of the data collection exoskeleton can collect and send back the information for the update and iteration of the multimodal operation model with tactile perception.
In addition, Damon Robotics attempts to open the use of data collection exoskeletons to the outside world. After the collector wears it for a certain period of time, they can obtain the corresponding remuneration. It is reported that its data collection exoskeleton has been used by some hotel staff.
Duan Jianghua said that Damon Robotics is promoting the realization of large-scale mass production of optical tactile sensors, and at the same time, it is also accelerating the research and development of dexterous tactile hands and multimodal perception and operation models with tactile perception.
Investor Views
He Fuchang, the founding partner of Jinding Capital, said: "The embodied intelligence field is in a stage of rapid technological research and development iteration. Its future commercialization process needs to be coordinated with specific scenarios to improve the generalization and reliability of general hardware and embodied intelligence. From the research and development and engineering implementation of the world's thinnest visual-tactile sensor, to the commercial application of the dexterous tactile hand, and to the forward-looking innovation of the embodied intelligent operation model with tactile perception, Damon's strategic layout is very clear. We believe and expect the company to create continuous value in the embodied intelligence industry. Jinding Capital and several listed companies behind it will also strategically join hands with Damon to continuously explore the application and implementation of strategic scenarios."
Dr. Shi Xin, the executive general manager of Guozhong Capital, said: "Guozhong Capital has continuously managed three physical funds of the National SME Development Fund, focusing on the cutting-edge technological innovation of SMEs and adhering to value investment as the core. The multimodal large model has raised the capabilities of semantic understanding, image recognition, task decomposition, and spatial reasoning to a new level, and the technological development of humanoid robots has reached a critical point; among them, the intelligent level and the upper limb operation ability determine the ceiling of the robot application scenarios. Damon Robotics was incubated at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Professor Wang Yu's team has been deeply engaged in the core technology fields of tactile sensors and dexterous operation of robot upper limbs for many years. Damon's self-developed optical tactile sensor and multimodal dexterous tactile hand products are extremely unique, with world-leading technical indicators. They are breakthrough technologies that promote the dexterous operation of embodied intelligence and have milestone significance in the industry. Guozhong Capital highly recognizes the international vision and scientific research accumulation of the Damon team in the field of embodied intelligent upper limb operation research. We believe that with the assistance of this round of capital, Damon will continue to lead the development direction of the industry in the embodied intelligence track."
He Zhiqiang, Senior Vice President of Lenovo Group and President of Lenovo Capital, said: "With the continuous progress of humanoid robot technology and the increasing market demand, the tactile sensor technology has the basis and potential to be transformed into a commercial product, and its importance in enabling the dexterous operation of robots is increasingly prominent. Damon Robotics was incubated at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, which is known as the "Whampoa Military Academy" in the robot field industry. It was co-founded by internationally renowned robot expert, the founding dean/chair professor of the Robotics Institute at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, professor at the National University of Singapore, and visiting professor at Stanford University, Wang Yu, and Dr. Duan Jianghua. The team has a deep technical foundation in the robot industry. Lenovo Capital has always been concerned about the layout of embodied intelligence, pan-robotics and other directions, and has successively laid out nearly 30 enterprises in the field of pan-robotics. In the future, relying on the advantages of Lenovo Capital CVC 2.0, it will provide all-round empowerment to Damon Robotics, helping to accelerate the iterative upgrade of its core technologies and promote the industrialization of tactile multimodal intelligent technology."