The first World Humanoid Robot Games were held from Aug. 15 to Aug. 17 in Beijing’s National Speed Skating Oval. At the games, 280 teams from 16 countries, including the US, Japan, and Germany, competed. Participating teams hailed from robotics companies, government agencies, universities, and middle schools.
China’s Unitree Robotics took home the most medals, with 11 wins and four gold medals. In second place, Chinese company X-Humanoid won 10 medals, two of which were gold, according to the South China Morning Post.
Humanoid robots demonstrated their prowess in soccer, running, martial arts, track and field, table tennis, and more. And while the robots showed remarkable balance and autonomy, sometimes they took spills.
A goalkeeper robot fell to the ground after its opponent in a soccer game scored, according to reporting from China by the Associated Press. Another robot that was modeling clothing fell and needed to be carried off the runway by human workers. Robots occasionally collided with each other or human handlers.
The second World Humanoid Robot Games will be held in August 2026, according to China’s Xinhua News Agency.
Not just a game: Sports test what industrial robots can do
Games like football can also be used to train the robots to coordinate with each other, resulting in improved performance for bots working on assembly lines.
“You can test a lot of interesting, new and exciting approaches in this contest,” Max Polter, a member of the HTWK Robots football team affiliated with Leipzig University of Applied Sciences in Germany, told Reuters. “If we try something and it doesn’t work, we lose the game. That’s sad, but it is better than investing a lot of money into a product that fails.”
Some of the competitions were directly tied to work that industrial robots might perform, such as cleaning, sorting medicines, or industrial handling.
More tech companies are focusing on robotics
Humanoid robots have long been a goal of some tech companies. Their futuristic abilities to manipulate objects and cross rough terrain have appeal, but building robots that balance on two legs has been a struggle. Tesla showed off its Optimus robot starting in 2021. NVIDIA created the Isaac GR00T N1 foundation model this year for teaching robots to reason their way around problems of balance and orientation. In May, Hugging Face began selling a $3,000 humanoid robot called HopeJR.
The field has also been rife with showmanship, with Optimus models doing supposedly autonomous actions at an October 2024 demonstration later revealed to be remotely controlled.
US-China tech rivalry includes robotics innovations
Humanoid robots have become a battlefield in the technological rivalry between China and the US, with the countries competing to excel in advanced fields like AI. Humanoid robots raced against humans in a half-marathon in Beijing in April, and a store selling humanoid robots to consumers opened in the same city in early August. In July, Intel spun out its humanoid robot division with the help of $50 million in Series A funding.
While today’s robots show more autonomy than their predecessors thanks to AI and other innovations, testing and demonstrating humanoid robots in this way is not new. In 2015, the South Korean Team KAIST won the DARPA Robotics Challenge, which tested robots with various body plans, including bipedal or humanoid configurations. The challenge put the bots in scenarios meant to judge their suitability for disaster relief or emergency response.
This story was updated after the close of the Games on Aug. 17.
For more robotics news, read about a company that is creating a VR-powered robot fight club.