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[midnightAI]

Unitree's humanoid robots at the 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala! They performed traditional Chinese martial arts—Liuhe Fist, staff sparring, nunchaku, and Drunken Fist—alongside kids from Tagou Martial Arts School.

 

[DKehoe]

I often wonder if the YouTubers ever have a "what the fuck am I doing with my life?" moment of clarity when making those thumbnails.

 

[midnightAI]

I often wonder if the YouTubers ever have a "what the fuck am I doing with my life?" moment of clarity when making those thumbnails.

Agreed, only noticed that fool afterwards, video changed

 

[deriks]

I guess that is just a good well written script, but can't argue that this is pretty impressive

 

[Toots]

Very impressive and very gay at the same time, just as any gala worth its while should be.

 

[MidGenRefresh]

Go China!

 

[roosnam1980]

impressed

 

[AJUMP23]

If you were making a war robot soldier would you make it Bi-pedal or would you give it a different design. What is the most effective design for destruction.

 

[jason10mm]

Wacky that they would put kids into the middle of what must be a choreographed machine movement, be like having them run through a bunch of factory automatons, hope you don't get caught under a drill! Maybe those robots got really good spacial awareness and avoidance routines in case a kid went off script into an area about to be filled with metal, or maybe they just have a higher risk tolerance than we would.

Really fluid movement though, CAN NOT WAIT until hollywood starts using them as stunt performers, imagine a fight scene or car stunt sequence with these things in there. Screw CGI, just make a fully articulated and controllable dragon/demon/sexy sexy succubus and go with that!

 

[P:axMagellanic]

If you were making a war robot soldier would you make it Bi-pedal or would you give it a different design. What is the most effective design for destruction.

Spider like perhaps.

 

[AJUMP23]

Spider like perhaps.

Eight legs would add a lot of cost.

 

[jason10mm]

If you were making a war robot soldier would you make it Bi-pedal or would you give it a different design. What is the most effective design for destruction.

The value of humanoid robots is that the tactics they could use and the equipment could be largely overlapping with the human soldiers next to them. So money spent on armor, weapons, maybe even helmets and commo/optics gear would have a dual benefit. Plus there may even be loyalty towards them from their side or sympathy from the enemy due to anthropomorphizing them. Not to men tion a lot of the tech would have direct civilian applications for e-butlers, police. etc.

If they were spider like or centaurs or whatever, the training, operational capabilities, and equipment would be more specialized and require more effort/cost. IMHO it would require a lot of undeniable advantages in performance to justify that route. And I'm guessing industry has a lot of data suggesting folks would be more accepting of a human-like servant robot than one that was a giant tarantula looking thing

 

[Rentahamster]

Compare this to last year's performance and you can see how much they've progressed in only a year.

 

[Spyxos]

Looks impressive, but how much of it is fake?

 

[jshackles]

Looks impressive, but how much of it is fake?

I got a lot of "this feels fake" vibes from OPs video. If you watch carefully you can see these robots making imperfect movements. My brain says all of these robots should be in perfect synchronization because they're all running off of the same script, but you can see robots that are slightly off timing or that slide more when landing jumps than others.

I guess you could argue that each robot has a different independent script running and that these subtle variations just make them seem more human-like, but I don't think we're at the 4D Chess stage of robotics just yet.

Personally I'm leaning towards this being fake / staged, probably with humans (other kids) in green-screen bodysuits that have had the robots overlaid in post-production.