(Yicai) Nov. 3 -- Midea Group has showcased its newest humanoid robot for housekeeping and unveiled its roadmap for embodied intelligence at the Chinese home appliance giant's 30th Technology Month and the Third Visionaries Conference.

Midea brought its third-generation humanoid robots, including the Mei Luo series for industrial applications and the Mei La series for housekeeping purposes, at the conference held in its home city of Foshan in Guangdong province on Oct. 31.

Mei La robots are designed for home services and can operate household appliances, including washing machines, microwaves, and fridges. The latest model, the Mei La X, is a mini bipedal robot, suitable for small home spaces.

Home robots will become more mature in testing scenarios within the next two to three years, but it will take a longer time for them to be considered fully marketable products, Xu Yi, director of Midea's artificial intelligence research institute, said at the conference.

Midea is updating its smart appliance ecosystem to enhance interactions and promote multi-agent collaboration, which will build a new behavioral data network through autonomous learning and decision-making, Xu noted.

There are several key scenarios for embodied intelligence for household services, including storage, laundry, cooking, cleaning, and caregiving, with the current exploration being primarily focused on storage and laundry.

The initial goal is to achieve high completion rates for individual tasks before pursuing additional capabilities, Xu explained. For instance, robots will be able to take clothes out of the washing machine, flatten and fold them, and take ingredients out of the fridge, recognize them, and store them in separate compartments.

About smart factories, Xu said that Midea is working on two fronts, which are building a decision-making central system and developing embodied intelligent terminals within the factory. The decision-making central system, also known as the factory brain, is capable of controlling various embodied intelligent terminals, such as humanoid robots and AI glasses.

Under the Mei Luo series, Midea presented the Mei Luo X at the conference. Mei Luo X is a bipedal robot with a high degree of freedom, which can better adapt to the needs of complex industrial scenarios.

Midea has a broad industrial layout, and the AI research institute provides support for building technology, Kuka robots, and healthcare initiatives, according to Xu.

In 2016, Midea bought German industrial robot giant Kuka to foray into the robotics field. As of March 31, Kuka had delivered more than 100,000 industrial robots.

Midea invested more than CNY43 billion (USD6 billion) in research and development in the past three years. In the first half of this year, its R&D investment increased 14 percent to CNY8.8 billion (USD1.2 billion) from a year earlier.

Editor: Futura Costaglione