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Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]

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Re: Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]

#111

Post by elil17 »

verdverm wrote: post #79
alex43578 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So 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.

I 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

The 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.

Re: Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]

#112

Post by tianqi »

imtringued wrote: post #28
pixelesque wrote: post #7

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 fo…

The impressive part here isn't the movement itself. You can easily train a model to perform a "procedural animation" that includes a full body control policy. The hard part is making it reliable enough to perform long sequences of movements and adapting to differences in robot placement. In other words, performing a flawless stage play is the hardest part.

I'm afraid you might not understand what you're talking about. Animation is a geometry problem, while robotics is a dynamics problem. The latter is subject to constraints many times greater than the former. There is no such "easy" model as you imagined that can transform the former into the latter.

Re: Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]

#113

Post by avereveard »

decimalenough wrote: post #96
avereveard wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do these dance? And what was the % of industrial capacity non automated over this percentage increase, because of course an industrializing country will have more manual processes to automate.

You asserted that American research is "financed by outcome potential not for grandstanding". But China is not just building dancing robots, they're also installing tons of industrial robots whose sole purpose is making money right now.

What is the automation gap tho

Re: Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]

#115

Post by michaelt »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #88
michaelt wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked on much less expensive, much smaller humanoid robots. These robots are certainly running through a scripted set of poses which has been extensively tested for the conditions (Humans would also be choreographed and have to hit certain marks at certain times). If you covered the stage in loose gravel or a thick carpet they'd all start falling over. The things the robots hold are almost certainly taped into…

Smaller platforms are actually harder to build: minimal power budget, weaker drive systems, less sensors, and fewer processing options. Not a fan of bipedal platforms or 50kg of servos for a number of reasons. Best regards. =3

Yes and no.

An Aldebaran Nao can fall over with no damage because it’s only 5kg and 58cm. And you can use relatively low power motors, so nobody can lose a finger to crushing in the joints.

But you miss out on the benefits of being able to operate in a human centric world - you’ll never get a Nao to climb stairs, open a door, or carry a cup of coffee.

Re: Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]

#116

Post by nialv7 »

somenameforme wrote: post #2

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

i'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

Re: Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]

#117

Post by martchat »

pjmlp wrote: post #19
rolymath wrote: post #15

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 thi…

As European faced with similar pain points, I would assert it was having those MBAs offshoring everything with a colonial attittude, as if the nations on the received end would only take orders from their masters and not learn to master the technology themselves. After a while, naturally the locals would buy the white label products that are anyway the same as the branded ones, many times produced on the same factory…

Problem is that China had both cost advantage (both human capital and energy) and a large internal market. If as a company you decided not to invest and build a factory in China, you were quickly losing vs your competitor. The solution to this problem for EU and US however won't be as simple..

Once China built an industrial base, and has cheap energy sources, you cannot directly out compete it. You can only try to maintain your own industrial base by locking competitors out of your market. There is no other way. In the end that's the result of globalization - US&EU companies thought they can produce cheap, sell expensive. Instead they trained their own competition, and due to weak IP laws enabled this exodus of industry know-how to China.

Now, if China was a smaller country - let's say Japan or Turkey - this wouldn't be such a huge problem. But for the global economy, having a single country that produces 80% of all consumer goods is also a huge problem. That was never the case before with the US (except maybe directly after WW2). US+Europe, Japan+Korea, Canada, Australia supply chain was much more diverse and distributed.

What happens now is dangerous because in the end the profits are not spread across the world, and economies of scale cause this monopoly to appear, which will be hard to mitigate.

Can countries "slow" down China and move production to diversified locations? For that to work, coordinated tariffs for advanced goods from China would have to be introduced, and production reallocated to multiple other countries - very difficult to execute..

Re: Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]

#119

Post by RobertoG »

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #100
rixed wrote: post #73

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…

whats z4

This solver, I suppose:

https://pypi.org/project/z4-solver/

Re: Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]

#120

Post by cma »

Pixelbrick wrote: post #99
tw1984 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

spot 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.

I look after one at a University that gets used for teaching & outreach & there's definitely no hydraulics on the thing.

They moved to motors from their older high speed hydraulics. I don't know if it was after unitree or not.
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