Watching Beijing's Spring Robot Race

The rapid development of robotics has brought us a fascinating case study.

The N2 robot from Noetix weighs over 40 pounds and is 3 feet tall and is said to be able to backflip. Unitree's G1 robot weighs about twice the size of the N2 and is about 4 feet tall. There are also many smaller humanoid robots participating in the competition, and there is even a robot that is driven forward by a fan.

Data interpretation

The half marathon attracted more than 12,000 spectators, but only 21 humanoid robots participated. Although the government pointed out that the participating robots conducted "intensive training" before the competition, not all robots completed the entire competition.

The champion - the Tiangong Ultra (or Sky Project Ultra) robot developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center completed the competition with a time of 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Some robots even compete in running shoes and sportswear.

Some people responded very enthusiastically.

"This represents a milestone in technology and engineering," Wu Zongze, a researcher at the Institute of International Governance of Artificial Intelligence at Tsinghua University, said in a press statement. "Although humanoid robots still have a long way to go, it is an amazing feat to just complete a competition that is so far away."

Wired's report quoted Alan Fern, a professor of robotics at Oregon State University, expressing a similar enthusiasm, or at least acknowledgement of the milestone: "Until about five years ago, we didn't really know how to make robots walk reliably. And now we've done that, that's going to prove it well."

How do robots run?

Watch the game video and you will find that many robots have control teams following alongside them, which shows that there is still a long way to go when it comes to making the robot move completely freely like a human.

On the other hand, you can also see that they have made tremendous progress in creating robots that can last for a long period of time, maintain a consistent range of motion and balance.

You can see the picture of the champion robot crossing the finish line, and you can also see the picture of the robot falling and losing. Therefore, there are conflicting scenes about the performance of robots in the competition. But overall, it is obvious that they can perform very well under the right conditions.

The pace of progress

If robotics developments are similar to the emergence of large language models (LLMs)—and we have good reason to think it is, then our technology will grow exponentially over time, as predicted by the hockey stick curve or S-curve.

This match in Beijing shows that Chinese culture is taking recognition of robots’ abilities seriously, which will soon live with us. When you see people standing with robots at the award ceremony after the game, you can see what the future will look like when we accept our mechanical counterparts.

As experts point out, the United States has not quickly caught up in this particular field of artificial intelligence development.

However, globally, it is only a matter of time before robots start to engage in more human activities with humans.

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