World Humanoid Robot Games 2026: laundry, not the 100m, tests robots

The World Humanoid Robot Games 2026 in Beijing put humanoid robots through sprinting, boxing, football and tasks inspired by factories, restaurants and emergency situations. Tiangong Ultra's 8.64-second 100 metres, quicker than Usain Bolt's 9.58-second world record, is the kind of result that makes the technology visible. Wai-keung Fung of Cardiff Metropolitan University argues that visibility is not the same as readiness.

Running fast is difficult, but the task itself is fairly clear: the robot knows where to go, the track is predictable and the finish line does not change shape. Laundry is the opposite. A shirt may be inside out, one sleeve may be hidden underneath another garment, and a pair of trousers may be twisted around a towel. Fabric is soft and constantly changing shape, so picking up one corner of a T-shirt moves the rest of it.

The difficulty is compounded because a physical skill does not transfer between machines the way an app can be installed on any device. A specialist laundry robot with rigid arms, overhead cameras and fabric-specific grippers shares neither the body nor the balance constraints of a humanoid with cameras in its head and five-fingered hands. Research projects such as Open X-Embodiment are exploring this problem by pooling experience from many different robots; the project has brought together more than one million real robot trajectories from 22 different robot types, with the hope that robots can learn useful patterns from one another rather than starting from zero every time.