Humanoid robots are racing, combating and falling over in a first-of-its-kind World Humanoid Robot Games occasion held in China.
The Olympics-style competitors options greater than 500 robots from 16 totally different international locations going head-to-head in sports activities corresponding to working, soccer and kickboxing. The occasion additionally options extra area of interest competitions, together with medication sorting and dealing with supplies for cleansing companies, Reuters reported.
An opening ceremony officially kicked off the games in Beijing on Thursday (Aug. 14), featuring robots dancing and playing musical instruments alongside human operators and companions. Robot athletes will now compete until the games come to a close on Sunday (Aug. 17).
Faced with an ageing population and stiff U.S. tech competition, China is investing billions of dollars into robotics. The games are a testament to the strides engineers are making in the field. However, spectators have also seen their fair share of robots moving awkwardly and falling over.
Human biology is very complicated, so building machines that can walk like us — let alone run and play sports — is difficult. For example, in robot soccer, participants didn’t pass the ball to each other with Messi-like precision, but rather walked into the ball to clumsily knock it forward, occasionally stumbling over each other and having to be dragged off the pitch.
The robots are also slower than humans. The fastest robot to have ever run 1,500 meters, for example, finished in 6 minutes and 34 seconds, which is almost twice as long as the human record, which stands at 3 minutes and 26 seconds, according to France 24.
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We’ve already seen humanoid robots compete in sporting occasions. For instance, in June, China hosted what was billed because the world’s first humanoid robotic fight competitors, which noticed kickboxing robots awkwardly knock seven bells out of one another. Robot aficionados may also be conversant in robots taking part in soccer and robots working half-marathons.
The new robotic video games carry collectively all of those sports activities and plenty of extra for the primary time. They additionally present engineers with a chance to check out their newest tech.
“You can test a lot of interesting new and exciting approaches in this contest,” Max Polter, a member of the HTWK Robots soccer crew from Germany, instructed Reuters. “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.”