Unitree recently announced that its application for the patent "A Mobile Robot" has been officially authorized. The invention was completed by the company's founder Wang Xingxing and Wang Kai. The approval of this patent marks a significant technological breakthrough for Unitree in simplifying the perception architecture of mobile robots, optimizing hardware costs, and improving data processing efficiency.
According to the patent abstract, the mobile robot adopts a unique industrial design: the body is shaped as a semi-elliptical sphere that is vertically placed, thin at the top and thick at the bottom. The core technology lies in the wide-angle LiDAR mounted at the top of the body, with the installation position's projection height perfectly aligned with the geometric center of the body.
This innovative structural layout aims to solve the high cost and high computing power load caused by the reliance on multiple sensors in traditional mobile robots. By combining the semi-elliptical body with the top-mounted wide-angle radar, the robot can achieve large-scale and precise environmental perception with just a single LiDAR. This not only significantly reduces the manufacturing cost of the entire unit but also avoids complex time-stamp alignment and data redundancy issues during the multi-sensor fusion (Data Fusion) process, greatly reducing the computational pressure on the backend processor.
