In new viral footage from China, a compact humanoid robot pulls that’s about 40 times its own weight.
The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) shared the striking 21-second clip on social media to demonstrate its new humanoid control system called THOR, which is short for Towards Human-level Whole-Body Reaction.
The robot pulling the car backwards is a G1 from Hangzhou-based robotics leader Unitree. It weighs 35 kg (77 lbs) while the white sedan in the footage is 1,400 kg (3,086 lbs). According to the researchers, the robot maintained perfect balance while achieving up to 95 kg (209 lbs) of measured pull force.
While most adults can pull a car in neural, the way the robot moves is far smoother and steadier, despite its relative light build and height of 127 cm (4 feet 1 inch). A human driver remained inside for safety. The robot, introduced in May 2024, is a popular research platform thanks to its relatively low pricing that starts at $16,000. However, the version featured in the demo is likely a higher-end
BAAI is a nonprofit research organization launched in November 2018 to bring together leading universities and tech companies like Tsinghua University, Peking University, Baidu, and ByteDance for fundamental AI research. Its mission is to advance AI through collaboration between academia and industry and to support Beijing’s long-term general-intelligence goals.