China’s Second Humanoid Robot Games Will Put More Than 2,000 Robots To Work

• Beijing will host the second World Humanoid Robot Games from August 22 to 26, featuring 2,056 robots from 666 teams across 16 countries.

• The competition has expanded sharply from the inaugural 2025 edition, moving from demonstrations into practical tests involving cleaning, hotel services, and emergency response.

• China will dominate the field with 1,975 robots from 641 teams, representing 157 companies and 200 research institutes and universities.

• Unitree has unveiled a humanoid robot capable of a claimed 12.66 metres per second, highlighting the speed of China’s robotics industry development.

August 18, () — Beijing is preparing for a sporting event where the competitors will not be human.

More than 2,000 humanoid robots from 16 countries are expected at the second World Humanoid Robot Games, scheduled for August 22 to 26 at Beijing’s National Speed Skating Oval. Organisers have registered 666 teams and 2,056 robots for 51 events, with 1,301 competition sessions planned across five days.

Participation has multiplied relative to last year’s inaugural event. Compared with 2025’s roster of 500-plus robots from 280 teams across 26 events, this year’s field represents a more than fourfold leap in robot numbers.

China accounts for most of the entries. A reported 641 Chinese teams have registered 1,975 robots, representing 157 companies and 200 universities and research institutes. Countries represented in the wider field include the United States, Germany, Japan and Brazil.

From Robot Races to Real Work

Sports remain a major part of the programme. Robots will compete in events including sprinting, long jump, weightlifting, table tennis, football and martial arts.

More revealing, however, are the events designed to resemble ordinary work.

Scenario-based competitions will test robots in areas such as hotel services, home cleaning, manufacturing and emergency response. Organisers have described the games as a way to demonstrate progress in embodied intelligence and fine manipulation, rather than simply showing machines performing pre-programmed movements.

An emergency-response competition already offered a useful reality check. During a firefighting challenge involving 12 teams, only three reportedly completed all three stages, which included identifying hazardous substances, closing randomly selected valves and putting out a simulated fire. Rain and changing conditions exposed problems with sensing and coordination.

That matters because impressive movement is only one part of making a useful humanoid robot. A machine that can run quickly or perform a backflip still has to recognise its surroundings, handle unexpected situations and complete a task reliably before businesses can depend on it.

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BEIJING, CHINA – APRIL 09: An Unitree full-size humanoid robot that can run is on display during the 1st China Humanoid Robot Industry Conference on April 9, 2024 in Beijing, China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)China’s robotics industry is also producing machines that are pushing the limits of physical performance.

Unitree recently unveiled a humanoid robot called Superman that the company says can reach 12.66 metres per second, or about 45.6 kilometres per hour, and perform a two-metre standing jump. The claimed running speed is above the roughly 12.4 metres per second peak reached by Usain Bolt during his 2009 100-metre world record.

Those numbers make for striking demonstrations, but the more important test for the industry is happening outside the track.

China is already the world’s leading market for humanoid robot shipments, while manufacturers are under growing pressure to show that the machines can create economic value.

Reuters reported that companies are increasingly concentrating on practical applications as the industry moves beyond demonstrations, with current deployments still largely limited to specialised tasks.

For that reason, the Beijing games are becoming less about whether a robot can beat another robot in a race and more about how much of the human environment a machine can actually handle.

The answer will not come from a medal table alone. It will come from whether these machines can move from controlled demonstrations into factories, shops, homes, hotels and other places where conditions are rarely predictable.

That is where China’s growing humanoid robot industry faces its more important competition.