It’s all fun and games until the nimble little robot starts flailing demonically.
In footage circulating online, a Unitree G1 robot loses balance while performing in front of a crowd in China. As it hits the ground, it uncontrollably thrashes its limbs in all directions, hitting a man in the nose.
The man, who appeared to be the robot’s operator, had tried to grab the humanoid machine to stop it from tipping over. Later in the video, he can be seen squatting on the ground nursing a bleeding nose.
While the injury didn’t appear life-threatening, the incident is a warning sign of how these popular androids can accidentally cause physical harm, something that becomes an increasingly serious risk as the machines continue to spend more time around humans.
Another robot-caused human injury has occurred with G1. With existing reinforcement learning policies, their robot is trained to do whatever it takes to stand up after a fall. During that recovery attempt, it kicked someone in the nose, causing heavy bleeding and a possible… pic.twitter.com/1BS9COAaLX
— Eren Chen (@ErenChenAI) February 18, 2026
A man named Eren Chen, who claims to work for the robotics firm Booster Robotics and shared the footage, homed in on a specific flaw in the Unitree robot’s design.
“With existing reinforcement learning policies, their robot is trained to do whatever it takes to stand up after a fall,” Chen wrote on X. “During that recovery attempt, it kicked someone in the nose, causing heavy bleeding and a possible fracture. This should be treated as a high-priority safety issue for Unitree to fix.”
Chen appears to be on to something. In other videos of Unitree G1 robots tumbling over, they often — but not always — thrash their limbs in random directions, making them unsafe to approach.
This isn’t the only example of someone getting hurt by an android. Another video showed a man performing martial arts moves get kicked in the groin by a G1 robot that was imitating his movements.
Martial arts and fighting moves, in fact, have become a popular wayof showing off a robot’s capabilities. While these stunts are amusing and impressive, they aren’t particularly relevant to the tech’s premise of being handy little assistants that can help us with our day-to-day chores.
They also do little to demonstrate that the robots are safe — something that should be the number one priority, if Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are anything to go by. Underscoring this necessity, a whistleblower at the firm Figure AI warned that its robots were powerful enough to crush a human skull, recalling that one of them narrowly missed striking an employee when it suddenly malfunctioned and punched a refrigerator, leaving a deep gash in its stainless steel door.
More on robots: Amazon’s Shiny New Warehouse Robot Just Failed in Spectacular Style
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