2,056 robots, 666 teams: World Humanoid Robot Games opens in Beijing — most aren't for sale
The 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games opened today at Beijing’s National Speed Skating Oval and runs through August 26: 666 teams fielding 2,056 robots across 51 events, up from 280 teams and roughly 500 robots at last year’s inaugural edition. Sixteen countries and regions are represented, though organizers put the Chinese share of entries at 96%.
The scale is the story, and it’s worth reading against what’s actually purchasable. A meaningful slice of the field runs on catalog hardware anyone can order today — Unitree’s G1, priced from $13,500 in the company’s own store, has shown up as a common base platform in track and combat events at prior Chinese robot-sports meets precisely because it’s cheap and off-the-shelf. PNDbotics’ Adam, listed at $100,000–120,000 through distributors, is built with open-source SDK access that makes it a plausible research-team pick too. Neither is a demo unit built for one event; both are things a buyer can price out and order on our own model pages right now.
The rest of the field is where the “market map” framing breaks down. Many of the 666 teams are university labs or startups running one-off builds — research platforms with no public price, no store listing, and no plan to ship a second unit. A robot finishing a 100-meter dash in Beijing this week says nothing about whether you can buy that specific machine; some can be ordered from Unitree tomorrow, others exist as a single prototype that never leaves the lab.
That split — shipping product versus one-off spectacle — is the same one this site tracks on every model page, and the Games are as good a stress test of it as any trade show. Expect plenty of viral clips over the next five days; expect most of the robots in them to still be unbuyable when the medals are handed out.
Sources
Primary sources referenced in this article. Prices in the tables come from the live index and carry their own as-of dates.
- Beijing Municipal Government — 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games (english.beijing.gov.cn)