The World Humanoid Robot Games ran for three more days after my earlier post. Though the event’s importance to the industry was largely in the dexterity events inspired by household chores and factory tasks, most coverage and cameras stayed glued to what spectators were most interested in: aggressive sports and cinematic mishaps.
(I did find some dexterity footage. It is tedious and unimpressive, but the chicken nuggets made it into the bucket. Until they didn’t.)
Most of the roughly eight hours of footage I scanned from the final three days was more of what we’ve already seen — especially kickboxing and soccer — but in different size categories. There was also a lot of underwhelming breakdancing, cheerleading, and freestyle gymnastics. To my eye, these all looked kind of like the same event but with different costumes and numbers of robots involved. Of these performers, the kid-sized breakdancers were probably the most impressive.
Social media seemed to get a kick out of the obstacle course, where robots loosely directed by remote control often seemed to be drunk or distracted.
Blooper reels in general were pretty popular. Here’s one of those queued to the part where a weightlifter twitches out mid-lift and staggers into the judges’ table.
I’m not sure if falling over was a winning or a disqualifying strategy in the tug of war, but it was definitely the dominant strategy.
More impressively, the record for the 100m sprint was broken again. The previous day’s run had come in at 8.86 seconds; the new record is now 8.64. As is their usual form, the robots then crashed into a barrier at full speed, with parts of the bots visibly breaking off. Usain Bolt’s 2009 record for humans still stands at 9.58 seconds.
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