Robot Athletes

Performance, rankings, training, and competitive bots.

• 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.
• RoboCup 2026 Heads to South Korea — And It's Bringing 3,000 Competitors With It — For the first time in its history, the world's largest robotics and AI competition lands in South Korea. RoboCup 2026 runs June 30 to July 6 at Songdo Convensia in Incheon.
• 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.
• The 2050 Mission: Can Robot Footballers Really Beat the World Cup Champions? — In 1997 a group of roboticists bet that by 2050 autonomous humanoid robots would beat the FIFA World Cup winners. Nearly three decades later, RoboCup is still the most audacious long-term goal in the history of sport.
• 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.
• One in Three Fans Would Watch a Robot Sports League — So What's Stopping It? — A YouGov survey found that one in three US sports fans would watch a league made entirely of robot athletes. The appetite is there. Here's what the obstacles still are.
• Faster, Stronger, Smarter: How AI Is Quietly Revolutionising Elite Sport — From AI-powered injury prediction and automated officiating to talent scouting algorithms, artificial intelligence is reshaping how sport is played, coached, and watched — at a pace accelerating year by year.
• The World's First Humanoid Robot Games: Tumbles, Triumphs, and a Glimpse of the Future — Over four days at Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval, 500 bipedal robots from 280 teams across 16 countries competed in the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games.
• Beijing's Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon: Tiangong Ultra Wins the World's First Bot vs. Human Road Race — The world's first half-marathon for humanoid robots ran in Beijing in April 2025 — Tiangong Ultra finished the 21.1km course in 2 hours 40 minutes. Here is what happened, who competed, and why it matters for robot athletics.
• 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.
• Figure AI's Robot Did the Dishes. Then It Explained Why. — In March 2024, Figure AI released a demo of their humanoid robot Figure 01 operating with a GPT-4-powered reasoning system. The robot sorted objects, made decisions, and described what it was doing in natural language — in real time.
• 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.