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Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]
- somenameforme 8mo agoJust submitted this as well. This is remarkable. Boston Dynamics has some catchup to do.
- elil17 8mo agoTo be fair to BD, Atlas can lift 50 kg and a Unitree G1 can lift about 2 kg. An Atlas could literally pick up and throw a G1. They are very different robots with very different goals, so it should be no surprise that the G1 appears much more agile.
- verdverm 8mo agoThe H2 is what everyone is talking about now some specs here: https://www.unitree.com/H2 https://www.unitree.com/H2 claimed 3h battery life, can hold about 10% of its weight (7kg, with arms)
- alex43578 8mo agoSo Atlas can lift 7x the capacity. Even Digit, the tote-consolidating robot, can do 35lbs. Unitree's demos are a lot of fun, and the antics of releasing the G1 to the public has certainly captured people's attention, but a "working" robot won't look, act, or develop from the G1 or even H2.
- kasperni 8mo agoUnitree has plenty other industrial robots. https://www.unitree.com/ https://www.unitree.com/ -> Click Robots
- elil17 8mo agoI wasn't trying to say that Unitree is somehow deficient. I'm sure they could build Atlas if they wanted. My point was that BD could probably build a robot with the shown acrobatic capabilities, but they choose not to because their goal is to build robots that carry heavy loads for industrial applications.
- skeledrew 8mo agoThey also wouldn't be getting any funding for doing such fun demos, even if they wanted to.
- verdverm 8mo agoI don't need a robot to lift more than 15lbs in order to do all my maid work Focussing on load capacity is missing the forest for the trees
- elil17 8mo agoThe point is that a robot with higher load capacity is necessarily less agile. BD's target market is industrial so their robots are necessarily larger and less agile. The fact that Unitree's robots appear so acrobatic reflects that they are likely on par with BD in terms of capabilities but have a different target market.
- d--b 8mo agoYeah, when the G1s dance with kids, I realized how small they actually were. Definitely not the same category.
- dash2 8mo agoIsn’t it easier to make an agile robot big than to make a big robot agile?
- chmod775 8mo agoOne big issue is the "joints". It's always a trade-off between mass, strength, speed, precision, and dexterity. State of the art is matching or exceeding organic joints on 2-3 axis, while being an order of magnitude below human/animal performance on the two other axis. Human individual fingers can withstand internal loads of hundreds of newtons, (possibly a thousand for brief periods if you're a star rock-climber), while at the same being capable of tasks such as writing, which require high speeds and (sub-)millimeter precision, while also enjoying 4 degrees of freedom (5 for the thumb), and they're stuffed full of sensory organs to boot. Oh and they're also self-healing, so taking some damage during use is no problem and they will actually adapt to the task they're used for over time. Everything we can make compared to this is laughably primitive. If you make an agile robot big, it now weighs more, which means its joints now need to handle greater loads, which makes it necessary to make them much bulkier and heavier. A lot of this is just inherent limitations of electric motors and having to convert rotational energy. This gets heavy fast. Decent synthetic electrically-driven muscle fibers would go a long way.
- pankajdoharey 8mo agoBoston dynamics is far behind plus the robots are so cheap , even their dog is cheaper than BD. I dont think their humanoid can even catch up to this price. I am sure US Army and for the chinese counterpart Chinese army will be their biggest customers. But i wonder how will this workout in situations like Plane hijack, fire fighting and other such places where human lives cant be risked to save more human lives. (Please Dont downvote because your american patriotism is poked try replying.)
- verdverm 8mo agocommenting on downvoting is against HN rules and typically comes with a compounding effect I personally agree with the rest, recommend you remove that last bit about downvoting and sneering if you can still edit
- nialv7 8mo agoi'd say atlas is roughly on par capability-wise. see their recent video: [1]. but boston has different priorities. [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UNorxwlZlFk https://youtube.com/watch?v=UNorxwlZlFk
- Markoff 8mo agothere is reason why in those 5 minutes you see them together in same shot with audience only 2 times and only for few seconds there is reason why most of the shots are not wide angle showing whole scene, seems they learned their lesson from last year where you could easily see on the edges all the failures this was heavily edited and repeated, I mean is it really surprising considering all CGI you see during whole gala? I watched whole 5 hours (though skimmed through a lot), they just can't make show same as seen by real people on the site, what you see in TV is very different from what audience has seen edit: the whole gala show is recording, it would be impossible to organize such event across many cities with so many performances live, olympics opening ceremony is walk in the park compared to this
- krackers 8mo ago>this was heavily edited and repeated While I don't know whether this was indeed broadcast live, at least this recording is missing a section since as the YT comments point out at 1:25 the staffs appear out of nowhere.
- somenameforme 8mo agoCan you elaborate on where? I'm not seeing anything at all at 1:25. This is a timestamp to 1:24: https://youtu.be/mUmlv814aJo?t=84 https://youtu.be/mUmlv814aJo?t=84 I was initially somewhat skeptical as well because this looks like a surprisingly massive leap in robotics capability, but haven't been able to find anything particularly sus.
- polishdude20 8mo agoStart watching at like 1:19 and see the kids don't have their own staff. Then at around 1:24 they do.
- somenameforme 8mo agoAhhh! When he said staffs I assumed he meant people, not staves! Yeah, that's 100% CG. Here [1] you can see where the kids take a stance where it was to be edited in, and if you pause at the exact moment - it looks pretty bad, with something like a lightsaber just popping in the kid's hand. Hmmm. Not sure what to make of this. I wish it was possible to see the raw unedited footage. It makes me question everything else. [1] - https://youtu.be/mUmlv814aJo?t=82 https://youtu.be/mUmlv814aJo?t=82
- senectus1 8mo agobattery life measured in a handful of minutes too :-P
- metanonsense 8mo agoTbf, if I did whay they do in this video, my battery life would more like a handful of seconds.
- verdverm 8mo ago3 hours, so if 180m is a handful, but I don't agree, my micro-drone is a handful at 3-4m of flight
- pixelesque 8mo agoSome people on X are saying they're "just" cloning/copying "puppet" human movements. I know very little about robotics, but given these appear totally free-standing, if that was the case (I personally don't think it is), wouldn't that imply they have the same centre of gravity and weight of limbs as humans? Surely they'd have to be able to balance themselves, and copying a human's movements "exactly" wouldn't work for their own motion otherwise? I think when watching I saw one or two of the robots "judder" their feet a bit out of sync with others - this seems to imply they are capable of balancing their own motion a bit individually.
- holoduke 8mo agoThose are the same people that say that China is 30 years behind in chip manufacturing.
- suddenlybananas 8mo agoI don't know if you're aware but robots and chips are different things that require different expertise.
- throwaway24778 8mo agoIt's still a completely farcical attitude. At this point it's just a matter of how many years it'll take for chinese manufacturing to outstrip western expertise with chips, too. Ten years? Five? Two? Very exciting times to live through.
- wasmainiac 8mo agoIt’s not a 1:1 human motion capture to servo translation. There is some work done to fix Center of gravity like you said and issues with friction and momentum. The hard part with “autonomy” is interpretation of the environment and feeding that back into some control loop to accomplish a goal in real time. That is why most of these demos are basically recordings of movements, like choreography.
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- kasperni 8mo agoTo best understand the speed of progress right now, take a look at the show from last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIq_AM4q534 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIq_AM4q534
- dachris 8mo agoIt looks like the difference between the Boston Dynamics robots 2016 vs 2021 The Spot dog (which inspired the Black Mirror "Metalhead" episode) in 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng Atlas doing backflips in 2021 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FByY3tSx2Ak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FByY3tSx2Ak So 5 years of progress within a year.
- tw1984 8mo agospot dog is hydraulically powered junk, unitree is motor driven from day one. Boston Dynamics was forced to switch to a motor driven architecture after it is proven by unitree. Boston Dynamics is the follower here.
- faeyanpiraat 8mo agowhy is hydraulics junk?
- AngryData 8mo agoPerhaps because of the potentially slower actuation speed, but you also generally get a lot more power from hydraulics so im not sure one can claim it is junk. Far less acrobatic, but also far more sumo wrestler.
- tencentshill 8mo agoLess fit for impressive youtube videos. I'm sure they have other boring utilities for the technology.
- Pixelbrick 8mo ago
- rolymath 8mo ago1) Cool, but when are they actually going to drive my car for me? 2) Any semblance of American technological superiority is pure fantasy at this point. The only area where Americans are truly "advanced" is in selling overpriced SaaS products. There are dozens of Chinese startups with robots just like this—as seen at CES—yet Boston Dynamics is still treated like it’s some untouchable, DARPA-level tech. 3) A lot of this comes down to cost: you can either hire one American fresh grad or a Chinese PhD for the same price. 3) The second reason is cultural: Americans tend to buy solutions, while the Chinese prefer to build them. Even SMEs in China maintain internal dev teams to build custom software for the business, as opposed to paying Salesforce for what is essentially a glorified Excel sheet with sprinkles of automation. 4) America is facing its own innovator's dilemma. The country is currently being run by MBAs and salespeople focused on extracting every last dollar from the consumer instead of providing real value or innovating. Perhaps we're one step beyond the innovators dilemma. The innovators are dead and we are in the corporate greed stage. 5) Americans are completely oblivious to how advanced China has become because of the propaganda they're fed. My personal "aha" moment was when Chinese EVs hit my local market and completely obliterated legacy automakers on both features and price. The American "free" (lol) market is being guarded by politicians but that won't work for long.
- spaceman_2020 8mo agoIt’s clear to me that the smartest thing China ever did was to limit speculation in the markets. So many human capital in America is wasted pumping up valuations instead of actually building stuff Every Jane Street hire could be building robots, but instead, they’re trading options and crypto and heck, even market making for prediction markets now
- Saline9515 8mo agoThe positive aspect is that there is plenty if venture capital for innovators; the negative one is that those innovations are stifled by various extraction techniques that allow VCs and other investors to get a return on investment. Crypto is a good example of how the equilibria is hard to maintain, and if the last cycle saw many interesting new products come to life, they all got crushed by ruthless profit-taking from early investors and team members.
- andrewstuart 8mo agoLooks fake.
- thenthenthen 8mo agoWhat really stood out was that when they portrayed different important jobs it was all done by men and women were in the background as decoration/onlookers in awe. Very strange development.
- slimebot80 8mo agoI assume this is highly staged as a set routine? No less impressive, but is it likely each robot autonomously learned a routine? Or just got programmed for a very exact act?
- raincole 8mo agoI'm not so sure what this question means... are you asking if China has AGI right now? I'm quite sure all similar performances done by humans are all staged.
- patapong 8mo agoPerhaps improv theater is the better test for AGI
- alex43578 8mo agoLLMs are already way too prepared for "Yes and..." improv, given GPT's ridiculous need to click-bait the end of every conversation.
- jbstack 8mo agoWhere human performances are staged, the human still needs be capable of learning the choreography. There's a difference between a robot learning the routine vs having it hardwired.
- sheept 8mo agoBased on where other companies are right now, it's probably a pre programmed routine, but the robots autonomously balance themselves. Anything beyond that would be quite a large leap, and I think Unitree would've gloated about it way more outside of the gala. The robots' speed and consistency are still impressive, though.
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- eisfresser 8mo agoIt is time to rewatch Terminator 2.
- 4gotunameagain 8mo agoWhat is the most impressive is the robustness. Of course they are following a captured human routine, but they are facing so many disturbances from which they need to recover and keep following the desired trajectories, while under multiple constraints (movement ranges, not losing balance, etc). You can see on the backflips that all robots landed quite differently, some with both knees on the ground, some with one, some with none. Yet all recovered gracefully and moved on to the next step of the choreography. It is genuinely impressive, and scary. Meanwhile in the west we are bickering like 10year olds.
- fragmede 8mo agoOh god the bickering. For self driving cars, lidar vs cameras is totally missing the point. Waymo can drive with cameras only. The AGI question is what decisions does it make when things go wrong.
- ciconia 8mo agoI guess the US's answer is going to be gas-powered robots ;-).
- wazoox 8mo agoCoal-powered steampunk robots would be awesome :D
- tw1984 8mo agoWell, that is obviously another overcapacity issue, this time for robotics. In the last 10 weeks, there were - Unitree's army of robots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4IOJH9Akhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4IOJH9Akhg Robotera sword dancing robots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ti9Mi8rbIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ti9Mi8rbIQ AGIbot's flying kicks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXnXdh6IEkA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXnXdh6IEkA LimX's Tron2 robot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut3QFPr7hyo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut3QFPr7hyo one interesting observation is that none of those companies are located in Shenzhen, which arguably has the best supply chain for all electronics stuff. I guess those trillions $ spent on infrastructure paid off - Shenzhen didn't suck all talents into its proximity, it becomes an enabler for industries across the country.
- eunos 8mo agoAgibot is not in Shenzhen? I think what happened is that other major cities/provinces like Hangzhou, Suzhou, Shanghai or Hefei started bankrolling talents and enterprises so they too can have major high tech enterprises in their town
- tw1984 8mo ago> Agibot is not in Shenzhen? AGIBot is the poster boy of the municipal government of Shanghai. > major cities/provinces like Hangzhou, Suzhou, Shanghai or Hefei started bankrolling talents and enterprises so they too can have major high tech enterprises in their town State Capitalism at its best.
- verdverm 8mo agoLimX looks to have a more humanoid offering now with a newer demo video than the one you linked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hIqs3TBb5g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hIqs3TBb5g
- lifestyleguru 8mo agoOh no, LinkedIn wall is leaking.
- k_kelly 8mo agoThis is AMAZING. We are definitely on an exponential in term of capabilities of humanoid robots. We are probably only years away from having a robot in the house, in construction of robots. Automating anything that a human can do is best done in a human sized robot. But. None of these are actually useful right now. I don't want something with the arm strength of a forklift taking care of my parents or kids. The demand for humanoid robots right now is like lift a fridge from a delivery truck to a house (aka more mobile forklift) or walk through toxic sewage to pull crates out. Super useful but basically just mobile cranes, which is a small market. China seems to be making the mistake of pushing a tech demo as a consumer product (we've all been on those projects...) which can make people hate the tech. Build something people want, don't mandate what they want. We're like 3-4 generations from amazing, useful robots. I'll be scared when these things are minding a bunch of dogs on stage.
- energy123 8mo ago> I don't want something with the arm strength of a forklift taking care of my parents or kids. A risk I never hear discussed is falling over and injuring children. Even the petite Unitree models are like a 70kg piece of furniture. Each year thousands get injured because of furniture falling over. I'd buy one immediately, but if I had kids or pets, I would wait for safety data on falls.
- jbstack 8mo agoHumans have a similar weight and can also fall, so would you be satisfied with a fall rate the same or better than an average human?
- expedition32 8mo agoPeople here on HN rave about FSD taxis... And we know that cars are potential death machines. Anyways these robots are cool and I hope we send robots to Mars instead of human astronauts.
- ponector 8mo ago>> None of these are actually useful right now. They could be really useful: without hesitation such humanoid could bring pack of explosives to the opposed treeline.
- merpkz 8mo agoAny information what battery life these things have? Would a human be able to outrun them given the need?
- rixed 8mo agoLast time I had to implement a typed programming language, it was for short programs only. So for typing I just converted the program into a large set of constraints and throw z4 at it, asking to optimize for smallest possible types. If z4 could find types for every expressions in less than a few seconds then it was well typed. You had to use a few trick for larger programs, but basically it managed to type any real programs and I never encountered an ambihuous case that caused a problem in practice. In case of failure, the small set of unsatisfiable constraints was easy to translate into nice error messages. This also allows for typing rules that are easy to state and can accomodate operators that adapts nicely to their environment. I would understand if this approach would be frowned upon, but I still wonder if any serious language ever used this approach?
- RobertoG 8mo agodamn, now I would like to know what you were really answering to.
- gravifer 8mo agoprobably under a wrong thread, but can you point me to the one you intended? Really curious about that
- rixed 8mo agoHaha, I've often wondered how one could answer to the wrong thread on HN, and there I am :) Was intended for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47025885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47025885 And z4 is, of course z3 (no I don't have special access to next-gen version of z3)
- faeyanpiraat 8mo agowhats z4
- RobertoG 8mo agoThis solver, I suppose: https://pypi.org/project/z4-solver/ https://pypi.org/project/z4-solver/
- kaon_2 8mo agoI was born in 1989. The most impressive sudden technological advance I have experienced have been LLMs. This video is a good candidate for second place. I am mindblown... That they even dare having children dance with them. The trust they must place. An acquantance bought a chess board with a robot arm, and it accidentally broke his finger because he picked up a piece that the robot arm wanted to pick up. China isn't just a few hours in the future, more like decades it feels like.
- thefz 8mo agoYou were born in 1989 and don't consider the internet the most impressive sudden technological advantage you have lived through? Wireless communication? Jesus.
- rkomorn 8mo agoSomeone born in 89, in many countries, would've grown up with the internet and non-smart cell phones, at least, no? They'd only have been 10 in 1999 when cell phones were pretty ubiquitous among adults. I'd say they were basically past it already. I was born ten years earlier and I'd agree that the internet is likely the biggest change in my lifespan, but I'm not sure I'd say it was as sudden as the past 2 years of AI.
- kaon_2 8mo agoSure those are impressive. But they weren't sudden. It was already there before I was born and slowly evolved. If I look at the most useful technologies around me, then Google Maps ranks high. But it wasn't sudden. It was on the desktop first. And then slowly crept through mobile. LLMs on the other hand, suddenly just kind of appeared.
- dvh 8mo agoIf the human-robot war is waged on a perfectly flat surface, we are fucked!
- Gud 8mo agoI would love this if it wasn’t clear that due to the configuration of our economic system this technology will be used against humanity and in favor of the demons who rule the planet.
- seekdeep 8mo agoWhat Does AI Think about the Kung Fu Robot Show in the Chinese New Year Gala? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072626
- ekjhgkejhgk 8mo agoBoards don't hit back.
- expedition32 8mo agoOne of the latest American coping mechanisms against China is their demographic crisis. Now the nice thing about demographics is that it's eminently predictable. IMO this is why China is going all in on robotics.