Backflips, faceplants, and the future of robots

A total of 280 droid teams clashed in 487 electrifying matches at the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing! From soccer triumphs and breathtaking street dance routines to fierce freestyle combat, agility and AI collided in spectacular fashion.

A new breed of athlete, counting 500 humanoid bots – some sleek, some endearingly awkward – packed into the stadium for the world's fist ever humanoid games. We're talking backflips, grocery runs, even a 1500-meter dash where China's Unitree H1 blazed through the track at 3.8 meters per second. That is faster than "walking machines" were supposed to move in most people's minds.

And here's the kicker: one bot, the Tiangong Ultra, ran the 100-meter race entirely driverless. No remote, no human controller, just an AI brain figuring out how to move forward in a crowd. It wasn't perfect, but it was strangely mesmerizing to watch a robot genuinely "decide" where to put its feet.

Of course, not every moment was a triumph. In the obstacle course, three out of four bots ended up in undignified heaps of bionic limbs on the ground, one even crashed into a human handler after toppling over, drawing gasps and chuckles at the same time. Oddly enough, I realized those were the moments I enjoyed most. You could see the engineers reacting in real time, jotting down mental notes as every stumble became a small clue. As one of them said afterwards, "Every crash teaches us more than a gold medal." It didn't sound like a line – it sounded like a coping mechanism, but a true one.

What struck me most about the Games wasn't just the speed records or the backflips – it was how the failures felt as revealing as the victories. Watching bots topple on the obstacle course, sometimes spectacularly, you could almost sense the engineers leaning forward, half-wincing, half-smiling. Those crashes weren't setbacks; they were live data points, the kind you rarely see outside a lab.

And that's what made the whole event fascinating. Instead of polished demos, the Games put raw progress on display. A machine that stumbled one moment might just as easily show up months later as a service bot in a warehouse. You could feel how quickly iteration happens once the rough edges are tested in public.

For me, that was the real story here: a competition that doubled as a workshop, where each stumble was less a failure than a hint at what's coming next.