China's "Ai Qiu" Emotional Humanoid Robot Launches Starting at 98,000 RMB
Sichuan Embodied Humanoid Robot Technology has officially launched "Ai Qiu," an emotional interaction humanoid robot priced starting at 98,000 RMB. The robot features the world's first "Emotion-Language-Action" (ELA) large model and a self-developed multimodal affective computing engine for emotion perception. This launch introduces a relatively affordable humanoid robot focused on emotional interaction, highlighting a shift toward integrating affective computing into embodied AI. It could pave the way for more socially intelligent robots in customer service, companionship, and healthcare. The robot stands 135 cm tall, features up to 32 degrees of freedom, and offers a 3-hour battery life with a side-pluggable battery. It also includes a 3D ultra-short-throw projection face for customizable expressions and options for 3-finger or 5-finger dexterous hands.
## BACKGROUND
Traditional humanoid robots focus primarily on physical tasks using Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to translate sensory inputs into physical movements. Multimodal affective computing allows systems to detect and respond to human emotions, and integrating this with robotics (as in ELA models) aims to make human-robot interactions more natural and empathetic.