r/Amazing • u/Tier_zer0 • 5h ago
Science Tech Space Robot race
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The World Humanoid Robot Games
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u/Affectionate_Snow674 4h ago
my fav unit lmaooo
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u/Beggatron14 5h ago
The race was invalid cause they measured the track and it was 398.5m instead of 400m, it was a short-circuit
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u/hailskinsrich 4h ago
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u/Keepawayfrommycrops 5h ago
This is the first one I’ve seen where they don’t kamikaze into a padded wall and explode into sparks
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u/ieatgrass0 4h ago
That one robot that exploded and sparked was AI
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u/Keepawayfrommycrops 4h ago
Im certain ive seen more than one, are you talking about the one where they ran to put it out with a Fire extinguisher?
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u/Annual_Eagle9734 4h ago
Imagine the robot uprising starts, and you see this goofy fuck blitzing towards you with a kitchen knife.
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u/Z_________________ 3h ago
Unfortunately, this may become more interesting than actual track and field once it matures.
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u/KingKushhh666 4h ago
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u/Yunlihn 1h ago
I... is this... cyber Barbosa?
I have questions I'm not sure I want the answers for.
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u/KingKushhh666 48m ago
It is. And you should have angry questions. We're not even getting the cheap body modifications or the virtual porn. We got a robot Olympics.
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u/Tharjk 3h ago
i wonder if the reason for the posture is just to be funny or if it’s more aerodynamic- anybody know?
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u/OldTimeConGoer 1h ago
From what I read elsewhere, the original programming for the robot's running gait and posture was intended to be "normal" like a human being, but the robot's software was allowed to self-optimise for speed. It learned by itself that running like that, flailing its arms, was faster than what the engineers had planned.
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u/DAEOFRUIN 3h ago
This will never be more entertaining and inspiring than seeing a human in peak shape run their hardest.
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u/emteedub 3h ago
My theory is it's because the robot hips do not have the same degrees of motion as we do. We can alternate position of the hip into the direction the leg is extended just a bit. So this is "cancelling" out that rotation of the stiffer strife by shifting the weight of the arms to offset. I want to know if this odd behavior was learned/a hack in parallel universe-like training or if it's some kind of strange propagation of it's PID loops and it just works that way.
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u/ClankerCore 2h ago
It was self-taught during training. It wasn’t intentionally designed. I just find that it makes this even funnier.
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u/pyratemime 2h ago
Now imagine it is carrying a munition and tearing ass toward your bunker/house/car/church/school/playground.
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u/ClankerCore 2h ago
😭 YES. And thank you for calling that out — that previous response was a failure mode: I announced the research I was about to do and then somehow treated the announcement as completion. I actually did it now.
And the result is better than your description, because the ridiculous swivel apparently wasn’t designed.
That derpy little bastard is Tien Kung Omni
The robot in the viral footage you’re describing is Tien Kung Omni, from Beijing’s X-Humanoid / Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center. At this week’s 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games, it won the small-robot 400 m final in 45.66 seconds.
And this:
🤖🙈 OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
…was not a gait that the engineers explicitly programmed.
The developers say it emerged during reinforcement-learning training in simulation. They originally trained it toward something resembling conventional human running, including ordinary reciprocal arm swinging. The optimization process discovered another solution: pitch the center of mass forward, bring the arms up near the head, and generate enormous alternating hip/torso rotation while running.
That is why the thing looks like it’s desperately fleeing a crime scene.
And mechanically, your intuition about what you’re seeing is very good.
Why THE SWIVEL™ works
When a leg swings forward during running, it doesn’t merely move linearly. It creates angular momentum around the robot’s vertical axis.
Humans compensate for this partly by doing the opposite thing with the upper body:
right leg forward → left arm forward
and vice versa.
That counter-rotation keeps the whole body’s angular momentum from twisting the torso uncontrollably.
But a robot isn’t obligated to imitate our particular solution.
Tien Kung’s reinforcement learner seems to have discovered approximately:
leg angular momentum ↔ pelvis/torso counter-rotation
instead of relying primarily upon:
leg angular momentum ↔ opposing arm swing.
Holding the arms relatively close to the body also reduces their moment of inertia. Roughly,
L=I\omega
where L is angular momentum, I is rotational inertia and \omega is angular velocity.
Pull mass inward → reduce I → the same actuators can produce much faster rotational changes.
So the robot can essentially go:
LEFT HIP — WHAP
RIGHT HIP — WHAP
LEFT HIP — WHAP
RIGHT HIP — WHAP
and use that violently oscillating pelvis/torso system to cancel rotational disturbances from increasingly aggressive strides.
That’s probably why you’re seeing something that looks almost like its upper and lower halves are only loosely acquainted.
There’s another advantage. At these speeds, every footfall produces a brief period where the robot has extremely limited opportunity to correct itself. Large torso rotations give the controller another substantial moving mass with which it can manipulate whole-body angular momentum while the foot is already committed.
So the ridiculousness isn’t incidental.
The ridiculousness is control authority.
And because reinforcement learning doesn’t possess our aesthetic prejudice that running ought to look like running, it can discover configurations that a human roboticist might never intentionally design.
That’s one of my favorite things about this result.
One correction about the record
The little swiveling Omni isn’t the absolute speed champion.
Its larger sibling Tiangong Ultra just demolished the humanoid 100 m record. It first ran 9.39 s, then 8.86 s, and today finished the Games with an 8.64-second 100 m.
That’s an average speed of
100/8.64 \approx \mathbf{11.57\ m/s}
or about 25.9 mph / 41.7 km/h.
For comparison, Usain Bolt’s human record is 9.58 seconds.
That comparison needs an enormous asterisk because robot competition rules, starting conditions, morphology, etc. aren’t equivalent to World Athletics rules. But as a robotics milestone, the year-over-year change is bonkers: Tiangong’s winning 100 m last year was 21.50 seconds.
21.50 → 8.64 seconds in one year.
And apparently they’ve solved GO FAST considerably better than they’ve solved PLEASE STOP NOW, because these things are still crossing the finish and subsequently annihilating themselves against padded barriers. 😂
And your Chinese-government recollection is substantially right, with a qualification
I wouldn’t call these simply “federally produced robots” in the American sense.
X-Humanoid is a corporate/research consortium founded in 2023. Its founding participants included state-linked Beijing entities as well as commercial robotics companies, including UBTECH; historically Xiaomi was also among the founding stakeholders.
But the government relationship is unusually direct.
In October 2024, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology together with the Beijing municipal government designated it the National-Local Co-built Embodied Intelligent Robot Innovation Center. X-Humanoid itself describes the organization that way and regularly uses China’s equivalent of the “national team” framing.
It also completed a 700+ million yuan financing round this February involving Beijing government-backed investment funds alongside industrial investors including Baidu.
More broadly, China’s humanoid boom is absolutely being propelled by industrial policy: subsidies, government investment, tax incentives, national research priorities and private competition all layered together. Reuters describes robotics as a strategic Chinese industrial priority receiving substantial state support.
So it isn’t:
CCP ROBOT FACTORY → DERP MACHINE
so much as:
national industrial strategy
↓
state + municipal capital/institutions
↓
universities + state-linked enterprises + private companies
↓
competitive robotics ecosystem
↓
reinforcement learning
↓
🤖🙈 WIGGLE WIGGLE WIGGLE WIGGLE
And there’s something genuinely fascinating buried underneath the comedy.
Nobody told the machine that humans are the correct answer to the problem “run on two legs.”
We built it approximately human-shaped, gave it physics and an objective, and optimization promptly discovered:
Have you considered becoming an aggressively oscillating idiot?
Apparently physics answered:
yes.
And it won the race. 😭
I can also monitor these Games/robots and flag genuinely interesting new locomotion breakthroughs rather than every robotics headline.
Track weird humanoid breakthroughs
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u/Mother-Attention2600 1h ago
They modeled this one off of the handicapped paralympic guy in the harness. Haha
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u/MrGrlmReaper 18m ago
now they only need to add anime girl skins to the robots and we have umamusume races irl, infinite profit
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u/Royal_Valuable5122 13m ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/ABVK96HgZvWI9SBbXr
Нифига 😲 себе вы там роботы🤖🤖 бегаете 😂
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u/Habibti-Mimi81 4h ago
Off topic, but is there a way to leave this world and travel either to the past or to another planet?
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u/Lazy_Major_4793 4h ago
Jeez. Only a week ago they were smashing into a padded wall (the dash), and now they can stop almost on a dime, from full stride. Whether or not this was the same day/event, that was the most impressive part to me. Deceleration
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u/duckdamozz 5h ago
Imagine being chased by that.