More than 600 teams gathered in Beijing for the World Humanoid Robot Games, presenting over 2,000 machines including 2,000 robots from more than 100 domestic manufacturers and competitors from 15 other nations. The event concluded on August 26 and featured the fastest humanoid running the 100-metre dash in 8.86 seconds, a time that surpassed the human world record set by Usain Bolt.
Speed and Slapstick
The opening ceremony highlighted the scale of the competition. The Tiangong Ultra, developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, completed the sprint in 8.86 seconds. Another machine, Lightning from the smartphone maker Honor, finished the distance in 9.47 seconds earlier in the week. Both times beat the human record. The Tiangong robot also won the long jump with a distance of 7.97 metres.
Other contests included a Ping Pong match against an Olympic champion, robots punching one another, and weightlifting attempts that often ended in failure. Some machines performed cheerleading routines in costumes. One unit appeared distracted by the display before tumbling over a balustrade.
These mishaps occur because the systems are pushed to their physical limits. Some robots struggled to stop, occasionally blowing out their motors in the process. The combination of high speed and physical instability creates a spectacle that is easy to anthropomorphise.
Practical Applications
Humanoids have existed for decades, but recent years have seen the development of compact, high-power motors capable of keeping robots dynamically balanced at high speeds. Stefanie Tellex, a roboticist at Brown University, notes that China has achieved amazing success in building robot hardware. Unitree, which spun up in the high-tech city of Hangzhou and recently went public, rose to fame by focusing on these innovations.
Running and jumping robots rely on algorithms trained in simulation to keep them from falling over. This approach explains why some robots have distinctly nonhuman running gaits. An algorithm lands on an optimal strategy by exploring different movements, which may not necessarily match the way humans have evolved to run.
Some of the new events this year would be too simple for human athletes, but they were designed to tax the robots’ brains as much as their brawn. These included plugging cables into sockets and slowly depositing a piece of garbage in a trash can inside a mock bedroom.
Tellex explains that training robots to manipulate objects within a more complex environment is far more difficult than having them sprint or leap through the air. Advanced manipulation is something of a holy grail in robotics, and something that some startups in the US are trying to solve using more advanced AI.
Fiddly finger skills are difficult for robots partly because they involve plenty of hard-to-predict stuff, like friction and slippage. Humans have a finely honed sense of touch, an innate understanding of physics, and the ability to adapt on a microscopic scale at lightning speed. Robots do not possess these same capabilities.
“It’s an example of Moravec’s paradox,” Tellex says. “Where things like backflips that seem more impressive than plugging in a cable are actually easier than plugging in a cable.”
One key caveat with the event is that some images and videos seem to show humans remotely operating some of the robots, suggesting the bots cannot handle them autonomously. Even so, the fact that robot hands are now deft enough to grasp tiny objects using tools, even under human control, is pretty impressive.
The full schedule for the games listed other events designed to test manual dexterity, including “block building” and “tweezer bean picking.” These tasks seem to reflect China’s eagerness to automate work in factories and warehouses, like wiring through an automobile’s chassis or assembling electronics.
A company called Galbot took part in several events, including a Supermarket Scenario Competition, which involves stocking shelves in a retail store. The company sees them as a way to push commercial capabilities forward. “Galbot will continue advancing humanoid robot capabilities by taking on increasingly challenging scenarios,” Yvonne Yuan, a representative for the company, told me in an email. “Moving from structured environments toward more open, unpredictable real-world applications where robots need to understand, adapt, and collaborate with humans.”
Despite a good deal of teleoperation across the various events, Galbot did demonstrate an impressive feat of autonomy—a robot capable of playing tennis with a human opponent. This requires advanced perception as well as high-speed reflexes.
At a time when AI is stirring up fears about mass job displacement, perhaps the biggest purpose of the World Humanoid Robot Games is getting the public excited about the potential of robotics.
“I think it is great that a country expresses excitement about science and engineering and has a positive view of a technological future,” says Chris Atkeson, a renowned roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University. “I am sorry it is not America.”
What it means
For people making things, the shift is from pure speed to dexterity. The ability to pick beans with tweezers or plug cables into sockets suggests that robots are becoming viable for tasks inside factories and warehouses. While some demonstrations still rely on human remote control, the progress in autonomous manipulation indicates that machines are moving toward understanding and adapting to open, unpredictable real-world applications.
