Overview

• Organized over three days at Beijing’s National Speed Skating Oval, the games feature 26 competitions spanning athletics, martial arts and real-world service tasks.
• Initial heats revealed significant mobility challenges, including mass falls in a five-a-side robot football match and erratic lane adherence in a 1,500-meter race.
• Unitree prototypes led the 1,500-meter event with a best time of 6:29:37 while X-Humanoid’s Tien Kung Ultra claimed second place after its April half-marathon victory.
• Robots perform non-sporting tasks such as medication categorization and hotel cleaning to assess decision-making, balance and interaction in complex settings.
• China is leveraging the high-profile competition to bolster its national robotics strategy following recent multi-billion-dollar commitments to robotics and AI startups.