RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesThe World Humanoid Robot Games made headlines this week, putting robotics experts in awe and leaving social media scrollers laughing at the robots’ histrionics, viral stumbles and dramatic crashes and burns.
In its second year, it is making an annual event out of stress-testing the limits of technological advancement, while allaying fears to the public that SkyNet is not on the verge of taking over the world.
"The goal of this event really was to show how fast we can get robots to go," Florida State University mechanical-engineering professor and robotics lab director Christian Hubicki told Fox News Digital on the final day of the five-day event. "What happens to them afterwards? Well, as we can see, it's a bit dramatic.
"They didn't care so much how they stopped. In fact, they had this big wall that they just smashed into."
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The robots might be running faster than Usain Bolt before they know how to stop, but the tech is still at the stage of standing up from a crawl, according to Hubicki, who is also known for being a past contestant on the CBS reality TV show "Survivor."
"They wanted to break the record, and they're willing to break the robots to do it," Hubicki said. "You can see robots are sparking, limbs are flying off. It's incredibly kinetic. It's like these things are almost like missiles flying at this wall. All to break the record."
The record broken was Bolt's 9.58 seconds in the 100-meter dash, but in a show of just how fast the robots can go and technology can advance, Saturday's 9.39 mark only lasted a few days.
A Chinese humanoid robot – Tiangong Ultra , developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Centre – on the event's final day won the large-size robot 100-meter final at 8.64 seconds, almost a second faster than Bolt's human world-record time.
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"This is a major milestone that people who work in specifically legged robotics, like I do, have wanted to see for a long time – just to prove that we could do this," Hubicki said. "So this is big deal. I watched this. This is incredible, how fast they get these robots to go.
"At the same time, we're not terribly surprised. We've known for a while that motors and gears and joints of robots could outperform people. We've known this. There have been papers specifically published that are titled, 'Why Robots Don't Outrun People Yet.' And the answer was we've just got to make them just a little bit smarter."
Artificial intelligence is helping, but the games also show how far the technology remains from reliable, practical use.
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"There's still a lot of human intelligence built into how these things are moving around," Hubicki said. "They're being told exactly what to do, go forward, rotate around the course, right? The higher level intelligence, we would say, is still very limited. And you can see this in the other events as well.
"You can see when they're playing robot tennis – and by the way, I'm very impressed with what they've been able to accomplish – they had to have these sort of external cameras pointing out exactly where the ball is so they know where to hit the ball. And that's OK, it's work in progress," he said.
"There's still a lot of limited intelligence on the robots, but of course they are getting better."
As in human athletics, the 100 meters was one of the highlights of the Beijing games, underscoring advances in robot mobility, balance and control systems.
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"The organizers of this event did a great job of highlighting specifically the types of tasks that Chinese robotics companies are great at doing, which are the athletic events," Hubicki said. "They focus a lot on robots that do these fantastic athletic stunts."
"And you might be wondering, couldn't robots already go faster than people? Well, yes, wheeled robots absolutely could," he explained. "We have had RC cars that outpace people for a very long time. But the challenge with humanoids has been coordinating all the motors, all the joints.
"We are so good at this as people, but thanks to the AI boom of the last handful of years, we figured out smarter and smarter ways to make robots coordinate their motion so they don't fall down while moving faster and faster, and squeeze out every last bit of performance that you can out of the motors – and that's why we're starting to see faster and faster robots."
The event, dubbed the " Robot Olympics, " brought together more than 2,000 robots from 666 teams, most of them Chinese. Its 51 disciplines included sports contests as well as task-based challenges in simulated factories, restaurants, offices and emergency settings.
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"They are getting smarter," he said. "The challenge is to get them smarter in a way that is really practical for us. I mean, it's fun for me to watch a robot going Usain Bolt speeds down a runway, but it doesn't really help us too much. The real challenge is how can we get them to be reliable and practical to help us."
Step one was to make them run as fast as they can – and look good doing it – before they knew how to stop.
"Last year's robots looked a little stiff and uncoordinated," Niu, 34, told Reuters. "This year, they are much better. They are like healthy newborn babies growing up."
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Eventually, the tech will require getting them to think for themselves about how to stop.
"The thing that's important to say about the smarts is it's a very specific kind of smarts – they're only figuring out how to coordinate their motion to the point where these robots, when they're running around, they don't even remember what happened a second ago," Hubicki said. "All they're looking at is like, 'Right now, what do...
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