Unitree demonstration during the Chinese New Year Gala is incredible!

[Walter Martinez]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R40IDdAkRZM

[dr steve]

Amazing dance choreography,  although the skeptic in me wonders if the image was created or filtered by Ai

That many independent robots not have any visual glitches is remarkable and questionable.  

Any feedback on whether this was just a live performance? 

On Wed, Feb 18, 2026 at 1:29 PM Walter Martinez <wmar...@gmail.com> wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R40IDdAkRZM

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[Chris Albertson]

THere is nothing special here.  These are just machines making pre-scripted motions.   The motions are nopt very complex as the feet don;t much. Prety much like a CNC machine tool with a human shape.   What would be impressive is if these robots were working in a contruction site all doing diffent kinds of productive work

I would not expect visual glitches on production robots.   The current state of the art for machinics is very good.   What we can’t yet do is anything usfull.

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[Thomas Messerschmidt]

I’ll have to agree with Chris here. Sure, the robots can dance, but can one get me a beer from the fridge? Can it pick up a broom and sweep the floor with it? Can it clean a table full of dirty dishes? Can it be instructed (in a factory) verbally like a human, “as the widgets come down the ramp, pack them in the boxes. Over there are the boxes.  When you run out of boxes, come and get me. I think I might have some more in the next building.”

Thomas Messerschmidt

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On Feb 17, 2026, at 10:31 PM, Chris Albertson <alberts...@gmail.com> wrote:

THere is nothing special here.  These are just machines making pre-scripted motions.   The motions are nopt very complex as the feet don;t much. Prety much like a CNC machine tool with a human shape.   What would be impressive is if these robots were working in a contruction site all doing diffent kinds of productive work

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[Alan Timm]

Gentlemen, I think there's some fundamental mischaracterization happening in this thread that's worth straightening out.

These are not pre-scripted motions. There is no choreography file, no motion-capture replay, no CNC-style waypoint program producing what you're seeing. If you've ever tried to hand-code a humanoid balancing on one leg while transitioning between dynamic poses, you'd appreciate why that framing doesn't hold up.

What you're actually looking at is a cutting-edge demonstration of reinforcement learning policies that are robust to real-world physical uncertainty — balance perturbations, surface variation, actuator imprecision. These behaviors are almost certainly trained in simulation (most likely NVIDIA Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab or a comparable physics-based RL pipeline) and then transferred to physical hardware. The robots aren't following a script; they're executing learned policies that dynamically adapt to maintain balance and hit target poses. That's a genuinely hard problem, and dismissing it as "just a CNC machine in a human shape" misses the point entirely.

For context, there are two major branches of physical robot AI converging right now:

Low-level motor policy learning via RL — walking, running, dancing, recovering from pushes, backflips. This is where many Chinese robotics companies (Unitree, UBTECH, etc.) have been making dramatic progress, and it's exactly what this video demonstrates.

Higher-level manipulation via behavioral cloning and RL — "find the can, pick it up, hand it to me." Companies like Figure, Boston Dynamucsm 1x, hobbyists like Me!, and various university labs are pushing this frontier.

These aren't competing approaches — they're complementary layers of the same stack, and they're converging fast.

Now — can these robots fetch you a beer from the fridge? Not reliably. Not yet. But "it can't do everything therefore it's nothing special" is a strange place to plant your flag. By that logic, the first airplane was unimpressive because it couldn't fly transatlantic.

And Chris — I'd pay real money to see a CNC machine do a backflip.  :-)

The future is closer than you think -- I wouldn't intentionally ignore the signs of it's approach.  :-)