Gallery: China’s robot games

Beijing, China is hosting the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games, a five-day event featuring 51 different disciplines for humanoid robots, including athletics, tennis, table tennis, and kickboxing. The robots are setting records in these events, surpassing human world records. Specifically, a robot has smashed the human world record for the 100-meter sprint, completing the distance in 9.39 seconds (defeating Usain Bolt's 9.58-second record), and a humanoid bot has achieved a remarkable height of 2.88 meters in the high jump (exceeding Javier Sotomayor's 2.45-meter record).

However, the most significant challenge for these robots is stopping safely. Unitree humanoid robot, for instance, reached speeds of 28.3 mph, but failed to brake in time, veering off the track and crashing into safety barriers. The difficulty in slowing down these high-speed robots poses a significant engineering challenge, as it requires complex energy dissipation, rebalancing, and transition management.

While researchers have managed to accomplish this in simulations, it has proven to be an insurmountable obstacle for actual sprinting robots, as the energy requirements and movement mechanisms are too complex for the robots' artificial intelligence (AI) to handle. The issue ultimately boils down to the perennial problem of robots avoiding falling over.

Although staying upright seems automatic for humans, it involves numerous precise calculations that become exponentially more complicated when a robot is in motion. Spectators remain unalarmed by the abrupt stopping mechanisms, but the engineering community is hard at work to overcome this formidable hurdle.