Yushu Robot Backflip: Musk’s Reaction | Literature City

Author｜Hayward

Original first release｜Blue Letter Project

When in a group chatting about badminton, you can see someone praising the Yushu robot for its great dance, you know that their appearance at Wang Leehom’s concert has really gone into outer space.

On December 18, at the Chengdu stop of Leehom Wang’s “The Best Place” tour, six Yushu G1 robots sang and danced with Wang Leehom on stage, following the dancers’ precise movements.

After the song ended, this group of robots even performed a very difficult task“Webster” somersaultthe movements were clean and neat, without any sloppiness; after the movement was completed, he landed steadily, which made everyone exclaim.

Most importantly, this show attracted a very important audience: the “world’s number one KOL (opinion leader)” from across the ocean,Musk。

He also saw the backflips of Yushu Robots on the X platform. Not only did he give a big thumbs up, but he also commented “Impressive”, attracting 40 million people overseas to watch the show together.

Being recognized by a big shot like Musk is definitely good news for Yushu Robot, which has worked hard and has been dancing since the Spring Festival Gala until now.

However, considering that Musk also has its own humanoid robot Optimus, Yushu can also be considered a peer.As the saying goes: peers are enemies, and China’s humanoid robot companies are one of Optimus’s biggest competitors…

The story behind this “like” may not be that simple.

01 “It’s better to dance”

Apart from anything else, the core reason why Musk likes it is because of the Yushu robot’s dance this time.He dances really well.

Although “robot dancing” is not Yushu’s initiative. As early as 2005, Sony robots served as Andy Lau’s backup dancers on the Spring Festival Gala. However, in the new era of intelligent robots, it is Yushu who made “robot dancing” popular again.

For example, Yushu G1, who shared the stage with Wang Leehom this time, is Yushu’s own “ace player” in dancing. In February of this year, they released it on the Internet, and the video of G1 dancing to “disco” received more than 6 million views. Subsequently, many commercial performances and programs have seen more of it performing on stage.

Now “dancing” on stage has even become a major “side job” of Yushu Robot.

Driven by Yushu, robots from more companies began to dance.

For example, at the World Robot Conference in August this year, robot companies such as Zhuji Dynamics, Pacini Technology and Stardust Intelligence all chose to let their robots dance off the stage to demonstrate the flexibility of a wave of products.

In September this year, Zhiyuan Robot, owned by former Bilibili Internet celebrity Zhihui Jun, also showed a clip of its Lingxi X2 robot performing a silky “Webster” somersault——

Yes, it’s the same model used by Yushu G1 in Wang Leehom’s concert.

In November this year, the IRON robot, which was grandly released by Xpeng, also fashionably “rided” the popularity of the release of Taylor Swift’s new album and danced a dance in the “Ophelia” MV that was popular on Xiaohongshu and Douyin.

Even Musk’s Optimus robot once skipped a beautiful piece of “Swan Lake” immersively, and the publisher of the video was even Musk himself.

However, it is precisely because today’s robots “love to dance too much” that we can often see a kind of complaint in the comment areas and posts of relevant news:Besides dancing, what else can you robots do?

Isn’t it agreed that robots should be able to think, learn and solve various complex problems like humans in “Terminator” and “I’m Robot”?

In fact, the important purpose of “dancing” is to show off your skills.

Humanoid robots such as Yushu G1 usually have 23 to 43 degrees of freedom throughout their bodies. Each joint (elbow, knee, ankle, hip) must not only move, but also complete the dual precise output of “position + torque” within milliseconds.

When humans dance, their core muscles subconsciously maintain balance. The robot has no subconscious mind. Every movement it makes, even a simple leg lift, will break the original center of gravity balance.

Therefore, in order not to fall, the robot’s whole-body control algorithm must complete 1,000 attitude corrections per second.

In this thousandth of a second, the system must simultaneously issue precise instructions to dozens of joints throughout the body to calculate how much force the left ankle should output and how much angle the right hip should tilt.

After the command is sent to the joint, the hardware must keep up instantly.First is the motorit must have extremely high explosive power. In an instant, the motor must be able to output huge power from a static state.

Next is the reducera set of gears used to amplify power. In this gear set, each gear is required to mesh tightly, almost reaching the “0 tolerance” level; even if there is a little gap between the gears, “the motor is turning but the legs have not moved” or “shaking when stopped” will occur, resulting in inaccurate movements.

Finally, the mechanical structuremust strike a dead balance between strength and lightness. When doing a somersault and landing, the leg structure must be hard enough to withstand the impact of several times the body weight without breaking; but if it is too heavy and the inertia is too great, the motor will not be able to drive it and the movement will slow down.

Therefore, what seems to be a simple dance movement is actually thousands of continuous stability tests. The robot must overcome physical resistance such as motor heating, gear wear, and slippery ground within a few minutes.

As long as the hardware response is a little slower, or the gear gap is a little larger, once the errors accumulate, the robot will immediately lose its balance and fall.

The “Webster” backflip is even more of a “ceiling-level” move in robot dance.

Being able to achieve a Webster somersault will be regarded as a milestone breakthrough in the field of robotics and is a “touchstone” for measuring the motion intelligence of robots.

It requires the superposition of three abilities: explosive power of the legs + instant flip + stable landing. Core strength, spatial perception, and body coordination are all indispensable.

Therefore, judging from the conclusion, the dance performed by the Yushu robot this time is really good; thinking at the best, it is reasonable for Musk to “like” this dance.

However, Yushu shouldn’t be too happy too soon.Let’s think about it a little more. Is Musk’s like really out of praise?

You know, Musk is an extremely smart businessman, a “zero-cost marketing master” and a world-renowned “traffic free prostitute”.Behind every social move he makes, there is often a strong purpose.

This likes may be another “self-marketing” that Musk is good at.

02 “Strategic deception”

In fact,This is not the first time Musk has given praise to friendly businessmen.

At that time, he publicly praised China’s electric vehicles as “extremely competitive” and even praised Volkswagen’s electrification transformation. On the surface, he was praising his opponents, but in fact, he was trying to sell a core logic to Wall Street and global consumers: “The replacement of fuel vehicles by electric vehicles is a general trend and an irreversible future.”

This time I gave Yushu a thumbs up and attracted tens of millions of people to watch. Maybe it was another “old trick”:The better Yushu dances, the more he proves that the path of “embodied intelligence” is feasible.

After all, Musk’s own Optimus robot is also very good at the art of “dancing”.

For example, the Optimus shown above can not only stand on one leg and stretch out in the “Swan Lake” style, but is also good at fast-paced one-leg dance. The technical content behind this is actually no lower than that of a backflip.

Just imagine, when the robot lands on one leg, its “support polygon” instantly shrinks from the area of both feet to only the size of one foot.

In order to maintain the graceful posture of the upper body stretching, the actuator of the ankle joint must make hundreds of extremely small torque adjustments at the millisecond level to prevent the robot from falling while maintaining graceful and stable movements.

This not only requires the actuator to be powerful, but also requires “no shaking”. This suppression of motor cogging torque and smooth planning of the whole body kinematic chain are precisely Tesla’s specialty in precision manufacturing.

Since his own children can even do such delicate work, Musk would go out of his way to praise other children’s children as “awesome”. It’s self-evident what kind of medicine is being sold in the gourd.

On the other hand, Musk himself doesn’t often post clips of his Optimus dancing.

Since Tesla AI Day first announced the Optimus concept in 2021, until the end of 2025, most of Musk’s related content updates have focused on technological progress, and only dancing-related entertainment videos have3-4accounting for even less than1%。

He also understands that no matter how good the robot dances, it is just a “performance” and a piece of “dead code” that is completely out of reach of the robot’s ultimate goal: AGI.

The precise stuck points and silky somersaults we saw at the concert were just the robot perfectly executing the line of instructions pre-written by the engineer on the millisecond timeline and reproducing the preset posture.

“APPSO” pointed out that for example, like the Yushu G1 dancing with Wang Leehom this time, each robot needs 1-2 technicians to serve at any time. At the same time, there must be an entire technical team on site to keep an eye on them to prevent them from slipping up. Some netizens also mentioned that if necessary, “remote control” may even be used to avoid errors in the performance.

This actually fundamentally explains why there are always a group of people who sneer at “robot dancing”:

No matter how smooth the movements are, if it does not have a “brain” to sense the environment and make decisions independently, then it is at best an expensive “electronic vase”, or in other words, a high-end version of a music box.

For this kind of “vase-like” controversy, more people scolded Musk Optimus on Twitter than Yushu.

From this perspective, some netizens believe that Musk cannot really think that Yushu’s dancing is awesome. This may even be Musk’s “strategic deception”:

On the surface, they praise Chinese friends in a high-profile manner, with friendly gestures and high emotional value. But behind the scenes, they are buying time for their own technical routes and next steps, and silently brewing real “big moves.”

03The biggest beneficiary

If we had to find a beneficiary of real money in this lively incident, the most likely beneficiary would beThose robot leasing companies who were so worried that they couldn’t sleep in the past few months.

Just at the beginning of this year, riding on the residual heat of the Spring Festival Gala, the daily rental price of humanoid robots such as Yushu G1 was as high as 15,000 to 30,000 yuan, and you even had to queue up to make an appointment. It can be said that “one machine is hard to find.”

But by the end of this year, according to surveys by the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily and other media, the daily rent of humanoid robots, which were once hard to find for 10,000 yuan, has plummeted to2,000 yuan – 3,000 yuanabout.

And the daily rent of those “robot dogs” that were popular all over the Internet in the past few years has plummeted to300 yuan – 500 yuan，It’s not even as high as the daily salary of two part-time college students distributing flyers.

In such an “industry’s darkest moment”, Musk’s praise may become a kind of sales promotion, allowing the robot rental industry that has fallen to the bottom to rise again confidently.

In any case, regardless of the truth behind Musk’s like, this like made Yushu out of the circle, at least it did not make the dance of their robots this year in vain.

This may be the most realistic portrayal of China’s robotics industry at the moment: hardware first, intelligence later. We have already created a “body” that can somersault, withstand beatings, and amaze the world. Now we just need to inject the “soul” called AGI.

Until the “brains” of robots truly evolve to keep up with the rhythm of their “bodies,” it can only be said that dancing more is better than sitting idle at home.