Over 2000 robots in this year's Humanoid Games!

Humanoid Games Are Getting Serious

Beijing's humanoid games are getting pretty serious. The Second World Humanoid Robot Games are coming to Beijing August 22nd through 26th, and year two looks less like a robotics demo and more like an actual Olympic Games. There are 666 teams, 2,056 robots, 51 events, and more than 1,300 matches. 

That's four times as many robots as last year.

And there are now 21 scenario-based events covering homes, hotels, factories, rescue, logistics, retail, offices, yeah, even vehicle charging. There are also new dexterous hand challenges: tool assembly, weighing powder, stacking blocks, hammering nails—that'll be interesting—opening bottles, using tweezers, whoa, and connecting cables.

Other events combine fine manipulation, object carrying, heavy lifting, and a 100-meter sprint. There is, however, no marathon. 

Autonomy rules are going to be tougher this year. Most competitive events have to be fully autonomous, and soccer now requires at least two robots to touch a ball before a goal counts.

Last year was about, hey, having the humanoid games at all. This year looks like it's going to be super interesting.

Robots and Electricity

Second story: robots and electricity. Robots could become a serious electricity load.

And we're talking about AI data centers all the time right now, but there's a side effect of the robotics boom we haven't talked about, and that's electricity. Wood Mackenzie estimates that industrial and humanoid robots could consume 363 terawatt-hours of electricity every year by 2035. That's less than a decade away. That's roughly the annual electricity use of 35 million U.S. homes.

Almost all of that is industrial robotics. Wood Mackenzie estimates that humanoids themselves are only about six terawatt-hours at that point. But if some of the more aggressive numbers that we've been seeing about humanoids are accurate, it could be a lot larger.

The trend matters here. There are about 5 million industrial robots operating today globally. Wood Mackenzie sees that growing to 16 million by 2035, while humanoids could pass 10 million units in that time. Again, less than a decade.

Yeah, we've been talking about AI data centers. Now there's robots. We better get lots of solar going. Once AI gets a body, it needs batteries, it needs motors, it needs actuators, factories, charging infrastructure, and yeah, the power itself. So we've got to start thinking about the energy there.

A robot hand that stretches

Third story: there's a new robotic hand that is pretty cool. And it actually stretches three and a half times farther than our own hands. That's pretty cool.

Chinese researchers have built a new robotic gripper called BioFlexBot. It takes a very different approach to copying the human hand. Instead of recreating all of our fingers and joints and tendons and muscles, it uses a coiled spring, a flexible shell, compressed air, and just two pneumatic inputs. And it can do some surprisingly delicate work.

It can manipulate an acupuncture needle. You want that to be done right. It can operate a pipette, twist a bottle cap, carry a toolbox, and perform tasks in a chemistry experiment. Pretty interesting thing.

There's a whole study about it that you can see right now. Still just a prototype, but there's a compelling idea here. Maybe the best robot hand doesn't need to be exactly like ours. We have to copy the function, but maybe not the anatomy.

That extra flexibility could be super useful inside engines, confined spaces, labs, factories, and, of course, everywhere humanoid robots are going to be.

Robot soccer is back

Well, guess what? It's part of the games, but it's also its own thing: humanoid soccer is coming back. Seventy-five teams registered, five robots per side, playing two 30-minute halves.

It's a little unimpressive at the moment, but this is going to get much, much better. They are operating autonomously. There are no humans with joysticks here. The robots have to see the ball, they have to navigate the field, they have to dribble, make decisions, and shoot on their own.

And yeah, they crash, and they crash quite a bit. There is a robot repair station that's next to the field. It's stocked with replacement joints, arms, and other parts. Imagine having that in real football or soccer. That might be very, very interesting.

So it's more than entertainment. It forces multiple hard robotics problems all at the same time: visual perception, balance, locomotion, decision-making, coordination, working with other robots, and recovery from unpredictable behavior. And, of course, sometimes there is emergency orthopedic surgery on robots.

Number of the day: 18,000

Okay, we have two numbers of the day today. And here's the first one: it's 18,000.

Unitree says it has now produced, over all time, approximately 18,000 bionic bipedal humanoid robots. That's cumulative. That's pretty interesting. That excludes other humanoid types, wheeled humanoid platforms. That's bipedal, bionic humanoid robots. That's pretty significant. That's pretty interesting, and it's pretty impressive.

And, of course, they released that number as they are having their IPO.

Second number of the day: 8,000

Right. And that brings up our second number of the day. We've seen this; it's been around for a while. They're not trading actively yet, but it's going to be soon. They are oversubscribed a bonkers 8,000 times.

It's a $900 million IPO, massively oversubscribed, 8,000 times oversubscribed. That's something like $7 trillion-plus chasing the $900 million in shares. Nearly 10 million retail investors participated.

The odds of actually getting the shares that you're bidding on fell to less than 0.1%. So yeah. Okay, it's not exactly that more than $7 trillion was chasing the IPO. It's the retail allocation; it's not the entire $900 million offering. And that's also not the entire value of the company, but it's pretty crazy. There's a ton of investor enthusiasm right now in China.

And I guess the question is whether Unitree's business, or others, can grow fast enough to match it.

Thank you so much for watching. And as always, like, subscribe, and there's much, much more at humanoidmegahub.com.