China’s humanoid robots are on a wild athletic streak.
Two years after the Chinese government set a national goal to dominate the emerging market, the scene just detonated with a wave of breakthroughs: record-setting endurance, basketball court agility, arrow-dodging bots, and now a new full-sized humanoid robot claiming superhuman power.
Unitree G1 Plays Basketball
Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics continues to dominate the budget humanoid niche with its viral G1 robot, which is priced starting at $16,000.
Research-grade configurations have become a default choice for elite labs like the Cheng Kar-Shun Robotics Institute at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), where engineers are training a G1 to embarrass real-world basketball players. They’re using a new AI system called SkillMimic that teaches robots to dribble, pass, and make shots with human demonstrations captured from videos and motion capture (MoCap) suits.
The G1 learns inside a computer simulation, practicing thousands of variations until motions become stable. Once trained, that policy is transferred to the real robot, which controls its hands, times the ball’s bounce, and adjusts its balance without remote input.
In footage shared by lead student research Yinghai Wang, the humanoid attempts a layup that’s blocked by the PhD candidate. Researchers are now aiming to for tougher moves and freer play.
MagicLab’s MagicBot Z1 Channels Neo
Another compact humanoid robot carving out its lane is the MagicBot Z1 by Wuxi-based MagicLab.
In a new demo, the pint-sized humanoid shows off its ability to dodge a flying arrow. Standing 140 cm (4 feet 7 inches), the Z1’s athletic abilities come from its 24 degrees of freedom (DoF) and 130 Nm torque joints.
Like Unitree, MagicLabs’ pricing varies widely. Consumer-facing listings place the Z1 unit around $40,000 while enterprise configurations reach into the six figures.
AgiBot A2’s Guiness World Record
Meanwhile in Shanghai, AgiBot’s flagship just entered the Guiness World Records for the longest journey ever walked by a humanoid robot.
The distinction put the robot, called the A2, in a short list of record holders like Toyota’s CUE6 with the farthest basketball shot, Pepper by SoftBank for the first mass-produced service humanoid, and I-SOBOT the world’s smallest humanoid.
The AgiBot biped began the 4-day expedition at Jinji Lake in Suzhou and ended in Shanghai’s Bund waterfront. The total distance was 106 km (65 miles). The route spanned highways, sidewalks, bridges, and tactile paving through day and night.
AgiBot says it used a mass-produced unit rather than a custom prototype. It relied on a hot-swappable battery system to continue walking without powering down during exchanges. According to AgiBot, the humanoid’s dual GPS modules, LiDAR, and infrared depth sensors helped it move across the varied terrain with no recorded falls.
The A2 humanoid’s pricing starts around $27,000.
Most Powerful Humanoid?
In Beijing, the rising startup Phybot just formally launched its new flagship full-sized humanoid, the PHYBOT M1, with a 41-second video of the robot pulling off a clean airborne backflip. Read more about that here.