Welcome, robot. Lesson number one of your new existence: life isn’t fair. Sometimes you’re just minding your business dancing, and a soccer ball comes out of nowhere and wallops you in the face.
In a video that Unitree Robotics released on February 18 on YouTube, its hapless G1 robot is having a good time dancing (rather well, I may add) when it’s suddenly set upon by an attacker with a series of blows that quickly escalate from errant soccer ball to giant cotton swab to the wooden end of said giant cotton swab.
It turned my stomach to watch. But what could’ve easily been the needle of national bad news that broke the camel’s back turned into a delightful human(oid) interest story when the G1 kept right on dancing, unfazed. If only we humans had the energy to persevere like that in 2025.
never stop dancing
TechRadar, which spent some time with the G1 at CES earlier this year, said “Despite its mobility and dexterity, G1’s capabilities are largely a product of remote control and canned or pre-programmed movements.” Perhaps that’s why Unitree hedges by calling the G1 a “humanoid agent AI avatar,” since the word robot tends to suggest more autonomy.
The video demonstrates an update that ostensibly improves the G1’s ability to maintain its focus and its balance during attempted interruptions. It’s a crucial skill for any humanoid robot that seeks to inhabit the clumsy real world of unpredictable slips on gravel and puddles and bumps by distracted humans.
“(The) feature was just developed in the past few days and hasn’t been rolled out to customers yet,” wrote Unitree for the YouTube video’s description. “There are also variations in functionality across different models and versions of the robot.” Unitree doesn’t say when the update will release to existing customers.
The G1 isn’t just a dancing robot. That’s what it does for downtime, after a hard day at working smashing walnuts, soldering, and flipping pancakes with its nimble fingers that can mimic a human’s light touch well enough to accomplish complex tasks.
The opening maneuver in this other video nearly made me piss myself, because it sure looks like the G1 had spent a weekend locked in a room with Kill Bill on repeat and had emerged with an ability to draw a katana. Vaguely threatening, but maybe one day it’ll be used for chopping vegetables? Hopefully?
Say, what’s that? Now you want one? That’ll run you $16,000, which doesn’t seem that bad for an ultra-limber robot with more lifelike movements than the herky-jerky humanoid robots of the recent past. It’s encouraging to see a robot that seems more, well, human-like in its movements.
Although actually, check out that video again at 00:13, where the G1 robot full-on blocks an attack from the hard end of the giant cotton swab… and looks damn good doing it. Now that the robots have learned to block our blows, it’s only a matter of time until they learn to evade our security systems and hack our nuclear weapons.
Oh well. If we have to be snuffed out by robots, better these festive dancing queens rather than Terminator’s overly stoic robots or I, Robot’s sad-boy robots.
The post This Dancing Robot Can Boogie Its Way Through a Human Attack appeared first on VICE.
