Over the weekend of August 16-18, 2025, Beijing’s National Speed Skating Oval—built for the 2022 Winter Olympics—was transformed into a scene worthy of a science fiction film. The first-ever World Humanoid Robot Games brought together more than 500 bipedal robots and 280 teams representing 16 countries, including China, Japan, Germany, Brazil, and the United States, for an Olympics-style showdown in the heart of China’s capital. It was a spectacle that combined high-tech ambition, international rivalry, and a fair share of slapstick pratfalls.
The event, supported by the Chinese government, featured 26 competitions ranging from traditional athletic events like the 400-metre dash, 1,500-metre race, 100-metre hurdles, and 4×100-metre relay, to soccer, kickboxing, and gymnastics. There were also more practical challenges, such as medicine sorting, hotel concierge tasks, and even restaurant service. The Games drew thousands of spectators, who cheered on the robots as they danced, marched, and occasionally tumbled across the arena floor. As reported by Smithsonian Magazine, the opening ceremony itself was a showcase of technical prowess, with robot flag-wavers and human-robot choreographed dance routines setting the stage for the competitions to come.
Unitree, a Hangzhou-based robotics company, quickly stole the spotlight. Its H1 humanoid robots made history by capturing four gold medals in the 400-metre dash, 1,500-metre race, 100-metre hurdles, and the 4×100-metre relay. According to South China Morning Post, Unitree topped the medal table with 11 medals in total, four of them gold, solidifying its leadership in humanoid performance. The H1’s victory in the 1,500-metre race came with a time of 6 minutes and 29 seconds—well shy of the human world record of 3 minutes and 26 seconds, but a remarkable feat for a machine that, just a few years ago, might have struggled to stay upright for more than a few steps.
But these weren’t graceful athletes. Videos from the event, widely shared on social media and reported by Popular Science and Deseret News, showed robots awkwardly falling down, sometimes losing arms or even heads, and often stumbling into or over each other. In one viral moment, a track-running robot veered off course, knocked down a spectator, and then—unfazed—rejoined the race. “Despite the pratfalls, significant progress in robot locomotion and balance is being achieved including backflips, sideflips, and other acrobatic and martial arts moves,” Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told The New York Times.
Strict eligibility requirements meant that all competing robots had to be self-developed, purchased, or leased by the participating teams. Each bot needed a trunk, upper limbs, two feet, and its own energy source, according to Mashable. There were also event-specific rules: for example, robots in the long jump or high jump couldn’t use elastic or take-off devices. While some contests, like soccer, devolved into a pile of entangled and wriggling bots, others showcased impressive athletic skills—albeit often with a comedic twist.
The Games were about more than just winning medals. For many teams, it was a chance to push the boundaries of embodied artificial intelligence and test new approaches in a live, unpredictable environment. “We come here to play and to win. But we are also interested in research,” Max Polter of Germany’s HTWK Robots soccer team told Reuters. “You can test a lot of interesting new and exciting approaches in this contest. 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.”
Some robots were designed for more practical tasks. StarBot, a California-based tech company specializing in customer service robots, sent a team built on the Chinese-made Unitree platform. Their robots excelled in restaurant scenarios, taking orders and delivering food to tables. “We thought it was a really good opportunity to come to China and be in an environment where everything is so modern and up to date,” company representative Gregorio Velasco told NBC News. Looking ahead, Velasco said, “we hope to be in people’s homes and restaurants, hotels, and I think in the future, many people will have robots involved in their life.”
The Games served as a microcosm of the broader global race for artificial intelligence and robotics supremacy. In July 2025, China announced its global action plan for AI just days after the U.S. released its own, a move that experts say is “no coincidence” as the two countries vie for leadership in AI governance. Both nations see AI as a national security issue, with the U.S. seeking to restrict China’s access to advanced semiconductor chips, while China promises to help developing countries and promote state-led innovation, as noted by the Atlantic Council.
China’s government has been investing tens of billions of dollars into AI research and state subsidies, much like it did with the electric vehicle industry. In January, the Bank of China invested one trillion yuan (about $140 billion) into domestic chip and AI startups. According to the International Federation of Robotics, humanoids are now “the center of their national strategy.” Despite American companies such as Boston Dynamics dominating high-end research, China’s focus is on mass-producing affordable robots at scale, as reported by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
Industry watchers are bullish on the future. A May report from Morgan Stanley predicts that the humanoid robot market could reach $5 trillion by 2050, with about a billion units in use—primarily for commercial and industrial purposes. China is forecasted to have the largest share, with 302.3 million humanoid robots, compared to 77.7 million in the U.S. “Adoption should be relatively slow until the mid-2030s, accelerating in the late 2030s and 2040s,” said Adam Jonas, Morgan Stanley’s Head of Global Autos and Shared Mobility Research. However, the report is more conservative about household use, projecting only 80 million humanoids in homes by 2050. “We are not going to see a robot in every home overnight,” Jonas cautioned.
For all the progress, experts agree that robots still have a long way to go before matching human adaptability. “The state of A.I. is nowhere near seeing humanoids operating out of uncontrolled environments,” Jonathan Aitken, an engineer at the University of Sheffield, told The Guardian. Wang Xiaoyin of NexAurora, a Chinese robot developer, echoed this, saying robots still lack a “robust AI brain.” The “real AI age,” he argued, will only begin when robots can think and behave independently after training.
Yet, as the laughter and applause echoed through Beijing’s Olympic venue, it was clear that the World Humanoid Robot Games had accomplished something remarkable. They offered a glimpse into a future where robots—clumsy as they may be today—are steadily marching, tumbling, and learning their way toward a larger role in society and industry. For now, the world watches, marvels, and maybe even roots for the underdog bot that gets back up and keeps on running.
