Unitree’s robots lit up stages in the US and China this week.
On the America’s Got Talent Season 21 finale, eight Unitree G1 humanoid robots, including one on wheels, performed a traditional Chinese water-sleeve dance. Then they shared the stage with Royal Lasers and Steve Aoki for a three-song medley.
Led by Wu Yufei, an engineer and amateur dancer from Sichuan, the robots breezed through AGT’s audition and quarterfinals. All four judges voted unanimously to advance after his June 2 performance featuring the crew of eight Chinese humanoids dancing and doing somersaults to the Lady Gaga song ‘Abracadabra.’ Simon Cowell called it “nuts but brilliant.”
During the Sept. 8 quarterfinals, they performed a martial arts routine to Zhang Yixing’s ‘Lit.’ Sophia Vergara was so impressed she hit her Live Golden Buzzer, the strongest move a judge can make on AGT. It meant they skipped the semis and went straight to the finals.’
For the Sept. 22 finale, Vergara and Howie Mandel showered them with praise. Vergara said she hoped America voted for them while Mandel said the show should be renamed to ‘America’s Got Technology.’
America’s vote did not match the enthusiasm. They landed in the bottom half of the Top 10. AGT does not publish results below the Top 5.
Nene Royal, a 16-year-old singer/guitarist from Thailand, walked away with the $1 million price and headline slot at AGT’s upcoming concert in Las Vegas. It shouldn’t be a surprise since Royal got way more views on YouTube compared to Unitree: 51M total compared to Unitree’s 8.5M.
Back in China, 19 larger Unitree H2 humanoid robots opened the 48th WorldSkills Competition in Shanghai for a crowd of nearly 10,000 people. Organizers said it was the first autonomous group dance by full-size humanoid robots with close, unshielded human partners.
They joined 120 human dancers donning shiny jumpsuits and metallic masks that made it hard to tell who was who. After the masks came off, six of the fake humans waltzed with six real women.
One robot also performed a 10 second finger dance with its dexterous hands. The hand did not appear to be Unitree’s newly unveiled Dex5-S end effector that boasts 22 degrees of freedom (DoF), tactile sensing, and starts at $6,500.