Last year's champion cut its own entry list — and the times Unitree won with in 2025 were beaten by 50 seconds and four minutes

The second World Humanoid Robot Games close in Beijing today, and the clearest measure of how fast this field moves is not the winner but the machine that stopped competing. At the first edition a year ago, Unitree won the 400 m in 1:28.03 and its H1 won the 1500 m in 6:34.40. At this edition, the 400 m large class went to Tiangong Ultra in 38.15 s and the 1500 m was won in 2:21.64. The old marks were beaten by roughly fifty seconds and by more than four minutes. Both of this year's times are inside the human world records for the distances — 43.03 s and 3:26.00 — and in the 1500 m the entire top six finished ahead of the human mark. Unitree itself did not defend either title. Its robot finished at the back of its 100 m qualifying group, and the company issued a statement the same day: constraints on time, on the number of new machines available and on testing had led it to withdraw from some events it had already entered, and its effort remains on products that are in volume production. Founder Wang Xingxing watched from the stands. The company did compete in taijiquan, where it scored 21.21 points; the gold in that event went to AgiBot. The scale of the event grew with it. Organisers counted 666 teams from 16 countries across six continents, 2,056 robots and 51 event categories over 1,301 contests at the National Speed Skating Oval — 138% more teams than last year and four times as many machines. The rules changed in a direction that makes the times harder to dismiss. Several competitions, the 400 m among them, dropped remote control entirely: an operator may give the start command and nothing else. In the scenario contests — pharmaceutical packing, office work, EV charging, catering, emergency response — a fully autonomous run is scored at weight 1.0 and a teleoperated one at 0.5. Two robots now share a lane instead of running alone, and the obstacle courses added box climbing, net crawls, tyre arrays and stepping stones. Han Gang, a motion-control specialist at the Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics, points at navigation as the quiet reason for the jump: in 2025 the robots ran by looking at the painted lane markings, while this year they localise and map, and hold a lane at speed without seeing the line at all. For a company already shipping robots by the thousand, a games medal is not the same prize it is for a research centre. But the gap is now measured in minutes, and it was opened in twelve months.