China Just Held the First-Ever Humanoid Robot Fight Night

'We've officially entered the age of watching robots clobber each other in fighting rings,' writes Vice.com.

A kick-boxing competition was staged Sunday in Hangzhou, China using four robots from Unitree Robotics, reports Futurism. (The robots were named 'AI Strategist', 'Silk Artisan', 'Armored Mulan', and 'Energy Guardian'.) 'However, the robots weren't acting autonomously just yet, as they were being remotely controlled by human operator teams.'

Although those ringside human controllers used quick voice commands, according to the South China Morning Post:
Unlike typical remote-controlled toys, handling Unitree's G1 robots entails 'a whole set of motion-control algorithms powered by large [artificial intelligence] models', said Liu Tai, deputy chief engineer at China Telecommunication Technology Labs, which is under research institute China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.


More from Vice:

The G1 robots are just over 4 feet tall [130 cm] and weigh around 77 pounds [35 kg]. They wear gloves. They have headgear. They throw jabs, uppercuts, and surprisingly sharp kicks... One match even ended in a proper knockout when a robot stayed down for more than eight seconds. The fights ran three rounds and were scored based on clean hits to the head and torso, just like standard kickboxing...

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

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