Parts Falling And Flying Around In "Robot Olympics"

In the past few decades, China has rapidly transitioned from one of the poorest nations on Earth to the global leader when it comes to robotics production. Between 2022 and 2023, the People's Republic installed over 276,000 robots throughout various industries, more than every other country on Earth combined.

The machines are descending on Beijing this week, flocking from all corners of the world to take part in kickboxing, track, football, table tennis, and dance competitions in what's being called the world's first "Robot Olympics."

As reported by The Guardian, China's robots were put through their paces at the National Speed Skating Oval, the 12,000-seat facility constructed for the 2022 Winter Olympics. It was a fitting venue for the robogames, where engineers showed off their creations' abilities to balance, maneuver, and solve puzzles, all while maintaining battery life.

It's an impressive event, to be clear, but as humanoid robotics are still in their infancy, some of the results were unintentionally hysterical.

In one 1500-meter dash, for example, The Guardian reports that one competitor had to drop out early after its head flew off its body. During a five-on-five soccer match, the small humanoid bots struggled to register each other, often colliding and slowing the match to a crawl.

Other robots had to be helped by their human handlers, like a KO'd kickboxing-bot that had to be dragged out of the ring, its pink boxing gloves dangling at its sides.

Reuters reports there were 280 robo-lympics teams overall, representing universities and private companies from 16 different countries.

Though definitely designed to grab headlines and fill social media feeds, the competition also serves as a sort of stress-test for engineers.

"You can test a lot of interesting new and exciting approaches in this contest," Max Polter, a robotics programmer from 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 which failed."