Galbot's humanoid robots completed over 100 consecutive tennis rallies autonomously during the opening ceremony of the Second World Humanoid Robot Games (WHRG) in Beijing. The company characterized the demonstration as the first live autonomous humanoid tennis match and compared it to AlphaGo's 2016 victory over Go champion Lee Sedol, calling it tennis's "AstraTennis moment."
The event brought together 2,056 machines from 666 teams across 16 countries. During the demonstration, each robot independently assessed incoming shots and selected appropriate responses, including forehands, backhands, serves, returns, and recovery shots. The robots also played doubles matches with human tennis champions, adjusting their court positioning and strategies during play.
Technical Specifications
Galbot's G1 platform stands 173 centimeters tall and weighs 85 kilograms, with a 190-centimeter arm span. The torso can extend its reach to 240 centimeters. Each arm features 7 degrees of freedom and interchangeable end-effectors, including two-finger grippers and dexterous hands with 22 degrees of freedom.
The robots use visual and tactile sensors to track ball speed, spin, and trajectory. The underlying software, called LATENT (Learning Athletic Humanoid Tennis Skills from Imperfect Human Motion Data), breaks tennis movements into reusable components such as forehands, backhands, and lateral shuffles, then reassembles them into complete strokes. Researchers trained the system using approximately five hours of amateur tennis footage and reinforcement learning combined with large-scale simulation.
Other Demonstrations
The games also featured other robot achievements. Tiangong Ultra, a headless humanoid built by the government-backed Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics, completed a 100-meter sprint in 9.39 seconds and a 400-meter dash in 38.15 seconds. Unitree Robotics' Superman humanoid claimed a speed of 12.66 meters per second, though the company noted this figure comes from company video without independent verification.
