The Humanoids at China’s Robot Games Were Faster Than Usain Bolt—but I’m More Impressed by Their Tweezer Mastery

Some of the new events this year would be too simple for human athletes, but they were designed to tax the robots’ brains as much as their brawn. These included plugging cables into sockets and slowly depositing a piece of garbage in a trash can inside a mock bedroom.

Tellex explains that training robots to manipulate objects within a more complex environment is far more difficult than having them sprint or leap through the air. Advanced manipulation is something of a holy grail in robotics, and something that some startups in the US are trying to solve using more advanced AI.

Fiddly finger skills are difficult for robots partly because they involve plenty of hard-to-predict stuff, like friction and slippage. Humans have a finely honed sense of touch, an innate understanding of physics, and the ability to adapt on a microscopic scale at lightning speed. Robots? Not so much.

“It's an example of Moravec's paradox,” Tellex says. “Where things like backflips that seem more impressive than plugging in a cable are actually easier than plugging in a cable.”

One key caveat with the event: Some images and videos seem to show humans remotely operating some of the robots, suggesting the bots cannot handle them autonomously. Even so, the fact that robot hands are now deft enough to grasp tiny objects using tools, even under human control, is pretty impressive.

The full schedule for the games listed other events designed to test manual dexterity, including “block building” and “tweezer bean picking.” These tasks seem to reflect China’s eagerness to automate work in factories and warehouses, like wiring through an automobile’s chassis or assembling electronics.

A company called Galbot took part in several events, including a Supermarket Scenario Competition, which involves stocking shelves in a retail store. The company sees them as a way to push commercial capabilities forward. “Galbot will continue advancing humanoid robot capabilities by taking on increasingly challenging scenarios,” Yvonne Yuan, a representative for the company, told me in an email. “Moving from structured environments toward more open, unpredictable real-world applications where robots need to understand, adapt, and collaborate with humans.”