Robots sprinting, tumbling, and even crashing into each other—welcome to Beijing’s World Humanoid Robot Games.
Kicking off on Friday, the three-day spectacle brings together 280 teams from 16 countries.
All eager to prove just how far artificial intelligence and robotics have come.
Think Olympics, but for humanoids.
Competitions range from track and field to table tennis.
Alongside practical challenges like sorting medicine, handling materials, and even cleaning.
Who Were The Participants?
Teams hail from across the globe—Germany, the US, Brazil, and beyond—while Chinese companies such as Unitree, Fourier
Intelligence, and Booster Robotics dominate the hardware side.
For some, it’s about more than medals. “We come here to play and to win.
But we are also interested in research,” said Max Polter from Germany’s HTWK Robots football team.
“If we try something and it doesn’t work, we lose the game.
That’s sad—but better than investing a lot of money into a product which failed.”
And fail they did—spectacularly. Robots toppled mid-sprint and collapsed in the 1500m run.
During one football match, four machines collided and fell in a tangled heap.
The crowd gasped, then laughed.
Because in the end, isn’t that the charm? Watching machines stumble their way toward a very human goal: learning by failing.
