Kepler unveils Forerunner K2 humanoid at GITEX 2024
Forerunner K2 combines rope-driven hands, a larger battery and an industrial control stack, with customer-site testing underway.
Kepler Robotics has introduced Forerunner K2 at GITEX GLOBAL 2024, presenting an upgraded humanoid for manufacturing and logistics work. In its 21 October announcement, the Shanghai company described K2 as the fifth generation of its development programme, combining changes to manipulation, locomotion, power and control.
K2 has 52 degrees of freedom and rope-driven hands with up to 11 active and passive degrees of freedom each. Kepler lists a 15 kg rated load per hand and up to 96 fingertip contact points, intended to provide feedback when gripping and carrying objects. An integrated limb structure and star wiring arrangement accompany a 2.33 kWh battery, for which the company claims up to eight hours of operation.
The control system combines imitation learning and reinforcement learning with cloud-based cognitive models and embodied control. Kepler says it has improved teleoperation and coordinated movement, including the two-degree-of-freedom head, as it develops behaviours for industrial environments.
Kepler reports engagement with approximately 50 prospective customers and testing at customer sites across material handling, sample processing, patrol, stamped-part collection and quality inspection. Those activities describe application development and trials; the announcement does not establish that all participating companies have purchased or deployed production fleets.