Robotics Special: Records tumble at China's World Humanoid Robot Games

Welcome back, Superhuman. China just held what looked suspiciously like the Olympics of the future. Humanoid robots smashed decades-old sprint records, flew nearly eight meters through the air, and showcased the fascinating leaps and advances in the technology. Meanwhile, Hugging Face just dropped a cute duck robot for your home, and it costs less than a mid-range smartphone.

1. Everything that happened at China’s World Humanoid Robot Games: Videos from the event flooded our socials this week, demonstrating the leaps China has taken in robotics in the last year. Here’s everything you might have missed:

2. Hugging Face goes viral with a cute, $399 duck robot: The Microduck can waddle, roller skate, and pick up items with its beak, all powered by an open reinforcement-learning stack developers can freely modify. The company frames it as democratizing "physical AI," with the launch landing right as Hugging Face is reportedly being eyed for a $13B acquisition by Nvidia. The company has already racked up $1 million in sales from Microduck. You can see the robot waddle around here.

3. Generalist rockets to a $3 billion valuation in two months: The robotics startup has picked up nearly $200 million more in funding, extending a Series B that valued it at $2 billion back in June. The company's Gen 1.5 model, which lets robots learn new tasks from video clips as short as 3 seconds, has investors betting on robotics reaching its own "ChatGPT moment." Rivals like Physical Intelligence and Skild AI are valued even higher, at $11 billion and $14 billion.

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Care Critters: Scientists have fitted giant burrowing cockroaches with cameras and tiny remote-controlled injectors, aiming to turn them from mobile sensors into real first responders. In testing, the "paraborgs" hit their injection target 95% of the time at close range, with the full navigate-and-inject task succeeding 72% of the time. Researchers say swarms of these insects could be deployed in real disaster zones in 5 to 10 years.

Storm Breaker: Y Combinator-backed Meteoric Technologies claims its drones can fly into low overcast clouds and tweak water droplets to let more sunlight reach solar farms below. So far, the only evidence presented by the startup is a prototype, which dissipated an artificial cloud by just 13% in a lab chamber. The company's larger goal is to use the technology to weaken hurricanes — a claim that has drawn sharp skepticism from meteorologists.

Pit Crew: In Nashville, Lyft's Flexdrive unit is opening an 80,000-square-foot depot to clean, charge, and inspect Waymo robotaxis, staffing it with 70 workers, about half of them former Lyft drivers. Since robotaxis can rack up 100,000 miles a year, they need servicing multiple times a day — a small but telling example of AI reshaping jobs rather than simply erasing them.

Here are the biggest developments in the robotics space that you should know about:

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This is the closest thing to an Iron Dome for mosquitoes.

Photon Matrix has unveiled a portable mosquito air defense system that combines LiDAR, radar, and AI vision to spot flying insects within a 20-foot field, then fires a visible blue laser to zap them mid-air. An optional rotating base extends coverage to a full 360 degrees, and the unit runs 4 to 5 hours off a power bank. It's a genuinely wild upgrade from bug spray, using military-style targeting tech to defend your backyard barbecue.

You can check it out here.

Delivery robots may be watching you.

A Los Angeles woman has filmed several sidewalk delivery robots idling outside her house after dark, lights on and cameras forward — something she finds extremely creepy. See the footage here.

Companies like Serve Robotics and Coco Robotics route their fleets to stage in high-demand zones between deliveries, which often means residential streets. Chicago residents have already filed 800 petition signatures over similar issues, and some cities now cap how long robots can loiter on a sidewalk.

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Until next time,

Zain, Faiq, and the Superhuman AI team