China’s robots race ahead | The Verge

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on falling robots and the US-China AI race, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.

I’ve admitted my fondness for robot fail videos on Stepback before, and let me tell you the World Humanoid Robot Games did not disappoint.

The five-day event, which wrapped this week in Beijing, brought high drama, and brought it well. One robot, made by smartphone maker Honor, lost a leg mid-sprint, while others tripped in a flurry of sparks. Another finisher ran straight into a crash mat, bounced off it, and promptly burst into flames. In the weightlifting, one robot lost its balance beneath a modest barbell and toppled inexorably into the judges’ table, arms cartoonishly aloft. Robotic cheerleaders tumbled and stumbled through routines, while a separate bot fell off a platform in circumstances that, had it been human, might have looked suspiciously like it was gawking at the performers.

This was only the second World Humanoid Robot Games, though it was already far bigger than the inaugural event last year. Unlike this year, last year’s records were paltry. The winning 100-meter sprint was a glacial 21.50 seconds and the highest standing high jump was just 0.95 meters. In keeping with China’s habit of turning robots into public spectacle — from intricate dances at a Spring Festival Gala to demos at major tech events — both this and last year’s games were staged in Beijing’s National Speed Skating Oval, a former Olympic venue.

And a spectacle it was. At most sporting events, contestants losing limbs, careening into walls, catching fire, and regularly being carried away on stretchers — oh, and did I mention catching fire?! — would probably be grounds to stop proceedings. At the Humanoid Robot Games, it was par for the course.

Fire aside, the games were unusual in other ways too. Alongside familiar events like sprinting, football, boxing, and weightlifting were more unusual competitions in bed-making, parcel delivery, shelf stacking, clothes folding, and hammering nails. Aptly, there was a firefighting contest too.

These less standard offerings spoke to the real purpose of the games: getting robots out of the lab and into the messy real-world environments their makers hope they will ultimately work in. And China is making no secret of wanting to lead the way.

For all the spectacle and drama, the games show there has been massive progress in robotics in recent years. Records fell, with one humanoid running the 100-meter sprint in 9.39 seconds, beating Usain Bolt’s 2009 world record. Another bot reached 2.88 meters in a standing high jump, nearly half a meter above the human high-jump record that has stood since 1993. Those performances are almost unrecognizable compared to robotics competitions a decade ago, when even the most advanced machines struggled to stay upright.

But the games also show how far there is to go before humanoids are actually useful in the real world. The flashy, video-friendly sporting events were impressive, but the more mundane tasks were less thrilling — I don’t see picking up soybeans with tweezers, block-building, or powder-weighing becoming Olympic mainstays anytime soon.

While many events required robots to operate autonomously — including gymnastics, football, tug of war, table tennis, and some track events — others allowed for human assistance via teleoperation, albeit with a scoring penalty. The dexterity being displayed certainly points to genuine and impressive hardware improvements, but seems like there is still a long way to go before these machines can operate reliably on their own in places like factories or homes.

Beijing has not yet confirmed a third Humanoid Robot Games, but given the government’s enthusiasm for the industry, it would be surprising to not get another installment. The city has already confirmed another humanoid half-marathon for April, and the country plans to open its first robot-run hotel next year.

China was the undisputed champion of the games, and the country looks well placed to stay in top position moving forward — both at future competitions and in the humanoid robot industry as a whole. The medal table was almost entirely a Chinese affair, dominated in particular by AgiBot and Tien Kung, each scooping up more medals than nearly every other competitor combined, excluding the other.

In part, that asymmetry reflected the lack of international competition. Although the games were framed as a global affair, 641 of 666 teams were Chinese, domestically representing 157 companies and 200 universities, according to state-run China Daily. While there doesn’t seem to be a public breakdown of entrants, the biggest US humanoid players like Tesla, Boston Dynamics, and Figure were conspicuous by their absence.

Nevertheless, the sheer diversity of Chinese institutions represented in Beijing was a show of force, and a sign of how quickly the country’s robotics sector is maturing, even amid growing concerns about circular investment, thriving companies that lack viable products, and a possible humanoid bubble.

It’s not clear a stronger US showing at the games would’ve changed much. The US still has an edge in frontier AI and advanced chips, but China has been rapidly closing parts of that gap, while also making embodied AI a strategic national priority. The same cannot be said of Washington, which has for years paid much less attention to robotics and now trails China in nearly every regard, including manufacturing, deployment, and hardware. Some reports even suggest that recent efforts to ban foreign robots, a general policy squarely aimed at China, could backfire, given how dependent domestic firms are on Chinese components.

Catching up to China will take serious and concerted effort, but given how quickly the technology is moving, there’s still time to make up ground. Washington is already treating other areas of AI as strategic priorities in its competition with Beijing; robotics could be one of them. There will be plenty of stumbling along the way, and, hopefully, plenty more robot fail videos too.