Riley Cross

Robotics engineer and combat sport analyst. Riley covers humanoid development, BattleBots, and the machines pushing physical limits.

Articles

• World Records, Rubik's Cubes, and Basketball Shots: The Robots Rewriting the Record Books — From a Rubik's Cube solved in 0.103 seconds to a basketball shot from 24 metres, machines are setting benchmarks in 2025 and 2026 that would have seemed impossible a decade ago.
• A Robot Just Broke the Half-Marathon World Record — And It Wasn't Even Close — In April 2026, a humanoid robot running for Honor crossed the finish line in Beijing in 50 minutes and 26 seconds — more than seven minutes faster than the human world record.
• Meet Bolt: The Fastest Humanoid Robot Ever Built — Chinese startup MirrorMe Technology has unveiled a 175cm humanoid robot with a peak speed of 10 metres per second — within touching distance of Usain Bolt's all-time sprint record.
• BattleBots 2025 Power Rankings: The Heavyweights That Define the Season — A deep look at the BattleBots robots winning right now — the weapons, builders, and design choices that separate the elite from the rest of the 250-pound bracket.
• RoboCup 2024: The Robot Soccer Championship With a 2050 Deadline — Every year, teams of autonomous robots compete at the RoboCup World Championship. The long-term goal — stated explicitly — is to beat the human FIFA World Cup winners by 2050.
• Unitree H1: The Humanoid Robot That Runs Faster Than Most People — Chinese robotics company Unitree's H1 humanoid robot reached a running speed of 3.3 meters per second — faster than the average human jog — using reinforcement learning trained entirely in simulation.
• Boston Dynamics Retires Hydraulic Atlas — The New Electric Model Is Something Else — After years of viral backflips and parkour, Boston Dynamics quietly killed its hydraulic Atlas in April 2024 and unveiled a fully electric replacement that may be the most capable humanoid ever built.
• Inside the Battlebox: How BattleBots Built the World's Most Dangerous Arena — The Battlebox has contained 250-pound machines with spinning weapons that store the kinetic energy of a car crash. Here is the engineering behind the arena that makes it survivable — for spectators, at least.
• BattleBots' Most Dangerous Machines Right Now — and What Makes Them Win — Combat robotics at the 250-pound weight limit has converged on a handful of weapon configurations that dominate the competition. Here is what makes the current top-tier BattleBots actually work.
• Cassie the Robot Ran a 5K Without Falling Over — Here's What Made It Possible — In 2021, Agility Robotics' bipedal robot Cassie completed a 5-kilometer run on a single battery charge. The achievement required solving problems in reinforcement learning and bipedal control that researchers had worked on for decades.