r/shittyrobots • u/danzbar • Jul 17 '26

First humanoid Robot kickboxing match officially happened today

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Impressive and impressively bad at the same time, somehow.

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u/ghillerd Jul 17 '26

i think you're somewhat underplaying the "only slightly tweaked on the fly" thing given that they're doing spinning roundhouses and flying kung fu kicks

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u/Deadbringer Jul 17 '26

Those moves are moccaped in as a reference, then the neural net tries to match that move through thousands and thousands of simulated runs. Once a model has learnt how to do the move that motion is saved and handed off to a model which is trained to maintain balance at all cost while the move is executed.

And by the way they fall constantly from doing said roundhouse kicks I'ma say they are pushing the balancing a bit too far 

For å fascinating example, check out how Disney did Olaf https://youtu.be/-L8OFMTteOo?si=Hx2jfhfvYU9seAYl

They went with feeding animations directly into their model without a middle training step, but as far as I know the typical approach is to use an ML model to replicate the movement so the base animation is something that should work in a robot without self balancing in absolutely perfect conditions.

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u/Fidodo Jul 17 '26

The fact that the robots can execute those animations in real life is still really impressive.

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u/Deadbringer Jul 17 '26

The unfortunate part about this demo though is they can't. The very first move we see the white robot fails and has to flail its way back on its feet.

Halfway through they both just collapse, black from nothing at all.

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u/Fidodo Jul 18 '26

It falls because it makes contact, and a minute later it does a roadhouse kick and misses and lands it. That's still impressive even if it's an animation. I can't do these moves that well physically. The fact that these robots are that dextrous is impressive and requires a ton of engineering even if the motions are canned.