Vbot Unveils Humanoid ATOM and 'Embodied Genome' After Selling 6,540 Robot Dogs
新智元 · wechat · 2026-08-22
Xinzhiyuan interviewed Vbot co-founder and VP of engineering Qin Hailong. The consumer quadruped 'Datou' sells for RMB 12,988, with 6,540 first-batch orders and 86% two-week retention; users have collectively walked it 23,700 km, held 1.26M conversations, and logged 131,500+ hours of companionship—all real-world data flowing back into the models.
At WRC 2026, Vbot unveiled the humanoid Vbot ATOM (1.6m tall, 1.8m reach, 31 DOF, delivery by year-end in personal/enterprise/dev editions) and the 'Embodied Genome' system built on three loops:
- IRE: streaming full-duplex multimodal model OmniDuplex with a Thinker-Talker architecture processing audio/video/text in 240ms slices;
- GEO: action-conditioned navigation WorldModel taking frames + 9D camera actions to predict futures, trained on 770k+ real navigation clips (3,000+ hours, 5,000 km trajectories);
- RSR (Real-Sim-Real): multi-embodiment controller EvoMorph with shared action-intent tokens plus per-body adapters; inverting the usual Sim-to-Real flow, real robot data is used to rebuild simulations 1:1 for training.
The team argues autonomous driving and embodied intelligence share the same underlying stack, so perception/planning/control from the quadruped transfer to the humanoid. Founders come from automotive/autonomous driving backgrounds, prioritizing safety—hence starting with the lower-risk quadruped before going humanoid. A wheeled-leg EDU-W variant launches too, hitting 2.5 m/s with a self-developed stabilization algorithm.
Related event: Vbot Unveils ATOM Humanoid Robot and Embodied Genome Tech(2 posts)→
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