Much of the recent coverage of humanoid robots has focused on a richly entertaining series of failures by Tesla’s Optimus model: Robot sees a water bottle and falls over; Robot refuses to confirm that it is, in fact, a robot; Robot is basically three underlings in a trench coat; Robot is going to be on sale by the end of next year, promise.
You might be forgiven, then, for thinking that humanoid robots are yet another Musk-ian pie in the sky—after all, if the foremost brain genius of our time can’t get them to work, then surely no one can. Right?
But just like designing EV batteries and not tolerating self-driving cars that kill people, it turns out that China does it better. Take this video from Chinese state TV’s broadcast of the country’s lunar new year celebrations, which highlights the capabilities of robotics company Unitree’s latest G1 and H2 models:
The robots perform somersaults, backflips, and synchronized kung fu moves—and, somewhat disconcertingly, wield both nunchakus and a staff with startling dexterity. They’re not the only Chinese-made robots that are dab hands with melee weapons, either—rival company Robotera recently released a video of one of its robots doing all sorts of alarming things with a sword:
It’s all a world away from Optimus trying to take off a non-existent VR headset, having an existential crisis, and collapsing.
A couple of disclaimers: this is obviously a very carefully choreographed and stage-managed performance. It was part of China’s Spring Festival celebrations, which are broadcast on state TV to an audience of billions, and have been used of late as a showcase for China’s technological and engineering prowess. Unitree’s robots were featured alongside those from three other companies, all of whom would have been extremely keen to make a good impression.
This is all to say that there was precisely zero leeway here for one of these robots falling hilariously on its ass, and a whole lot of incentive to do whatever was necessary to ensure that no such thing occurred. The South China Morning Post quotes Unitree as saying that “the kung fu segment was performed ‘fully autonomously’,” but as far as we can tell, the paper made no attempt to verify this statement. This leaves us with only the company’s word to trust on the matter, and it’s clearly going to talk up its robots as much as possible. (After all, Tesla also claims that its robots are fully autonomous, which… yeah.) There’s also the question of what “autonomous” means in this context, which could be anything from “Yeah, we just told these intelligent robots to go out and do some cool martial arts stuff” to “We painstakingly programmed and/or recorded every movement but did not actually control the robots remotely during the performance.”
Whatever the case, the fact that these robots can perform backflips, swing swords, and do that cool leg-whirling-over-the-head-while-getting-up-from-the-ground thing is clearly very impressive. It is also worth remembering, however, that for all the progress they appear to have made over the last couple of years, Chinese robotics companies’ products have had their own viral moments of uselessness. The robot that showered YouTuber WhistlinDiesel’s kitchen in pieces of omelette in a video that went viral last year, for example, was also made by Unitree. (Admittedly, in that case, the human involved was so spectacularly obnoxious that we may one day look back on the robot’s ineptitude as the moment the singularity arrived.)
So, will humanoid robots ever be viable for home use? Will we all end up living in Detroit: Become Human? Or is the whole idea destined to be the latest tech fad to prove fundamentally useless? The jury is still very much out—but it looks like, either way, the robots whose capabilities will decide these questions will be made in China.
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