Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]

To 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

Some 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.

What Does AI Think about the Kung Fu Robot Show in the Chinese New Year Gala?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47072626

I 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.

I 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.

This 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.

Last 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?

Just submitted this as well. This is remarkable. Boston Dynamics has some catchup to do.

What 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.

I guess the US's answer is going to be gas-powered robots ;-).

I 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?

Any information what battery life these things have? Would a human be able to outrun them given the need?

It is time to rewatch Terminator 2.

What 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.

If the human-robot war is waged on a perfectly flat surface, we are fucked!

Well, 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

Robotera sword dancing robots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ti9Mi8rbIQ

AGIbot's flying kicks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXnXdh6IEkA

LimX's Tron2 robot

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.

Oh no, LinkedIn wall is leaking.

battery life measured in a handful of minutes too :-P

there 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

1) 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.

Looks fake.