Call him Wall-E.
We might not have to fear machines replacing us in the Olympics just yet. A robo-sprinter’s test run ended in a shower of sparks after it plowed into a wall, sustaining damage to its midsection, as seen in a video with 5 million views on X.
“I think China’s robotics industry may be over-optimizing for speed right now,” Eren Chen, an AI expert who shared the footage, wrote in the caption.
The robo-flop occurred while it was trying out the track ahead of the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, China from August 22-26, Jam Press reported.
During this cybernetic competition, 2,056 robots from 666 teams across 16 countries will descend on the Chinese capital to compete in both sports and real-world tasks, according to Gizmodo.
Just like with a human sporting events, some synthetic competitors arrived ahead of time to try and feel out the course — with varying degrees of success. The cartoonish clip shows the unidentified flying down the track, when, all of a sudden, it collides with a padded blue wall.
Despite jogging backwards, the blundering bot is unable to correct course. The hapless humanoid topples backwards onto its noggin and seemingly breaks its waist, causing sparks to fly like one of the ill-fated police prototypes in “Robocop 2.”
This literal balls-to-the-wall incident elicited guffaws galore online with one X gawker musing, “twenty thousand yuan was gone like that.”
Another quipped that it was the “first robot to end his career early due to spinal injury.”
Why did its the automated athlete’s robo-lympic trial backfire so spectacularly? Some tech-sperts placed the blame on robot firms prioritizing speed above all else.
“Last year, running and dynamic motion control were meaningful because they proved a basic point: before a humanoid can do useful work, it first needs a capable body,” wrote Chen. “But once that foundation exists, simply making the robot run faster gives you diminishing returns.
He added, “Knowing when to slow down, when to stop, and how to stop safely matters just as much as how fast you can run. At the end of the day, our goal is to have a robot that can safely and reliably work around people and actually get things done.”
Notably, event organizers updated requirements for this year’s competition so that only autonomous — rather than remote-controlled — bots are eligible for certain track events.
This could add a degree of uncertainty to the highly-anticipated event. Techsperts predict that this year could see the debut of Unitree’s “Superman” humanoid, which the company claims can high jump 2 meters (6.56 feet) and run up to 12.66 m/s (28.3 mph), ostensibly making it faster than Usain Bolt.
Earlier this week, Chen shared another X video that seemed to show the robotronic prodigy testing out World Humanoid Robot Games’ track.
However, even the biped’s alleged superhumanoid abilities weren’t enough to stop it from running off the track and crashing into an electrical box.
Nonetheless, all eyes will be on Unitree.
The firm’s machinese killed it at last year’s inaugural competition, garnering four gold medals in the 400-meter dash, 1,500-meter race, 100-meter hurdles and 4×100-meter relay.
