A viral video from a Chinese lab shows an engineer learning the hard way to give robots space during testing.
The man in the video, shared by @zeonsunlight on the Chinese video sharing platform Bilibili, wears a motion capture suit as he apparently teaches a Unitree G1 humanoid robot martial arts. The engineer manages to kick himself in the privates and crouches over in pain. People in the background can be heard laughing.
The clip went viral across social media in China and the West.
“Using a mocap suit to kick yourself in the balls with a robot is a great metaphor to close out 2025,” Cix Liv, the founder of the San Francisco-based robot boxing league, REK, said on X.
The incident follows a similar embarrassing mishap featuring a teleoperated Tesla Optimus humanoid robot. During an event in Miami, the robot took a dramatic tumble while handing out water bottles. The fall quickly spread across social media in part because of the robot’s arm movements that resembled a human operator removing a VR headset.