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The Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend, billed by organizers as the world's first freestyle humanoid robot fighting competition, debuted Thursday at the Shenzhen Nanshan Cultural and Sports Center.
Organized by Shenzhen robotics company EngineAI, the event featured freestyle cage fights between life-sized humanoid robots before a live audience.
Thirty-two teams from around the world competed using EngineAI's T800 humanoid robot as the standardized fighting platform.
In the opening bout, one robot landed a flying kick that tore its opponent's head off. The damaged machine continued throwing punches with its head hanging by a cable before another knockdown severed the connection completely.
Despite losing its head-mounted sensors, the robot continued fighting using its torso-based core systems until the match ended. The winning robot then celebrated over its fallen opponent.
According to Interesting Engineering, the T800 stands 1.73 meters (5 feet 8 inches) tall, weighs 75 kilograms including its battery, and has 29 degrees of freedom across its body and seven degrees of freedom in each hand, enabling complex, human-like movements.
Legendary kung fu actor Donnie Yen attended the event and said watching robots fight in person was unlike anything he had seen on screen.
"Honestly, I used to see robot fighting only in science fiction movies," Yen said at the opening, as quoted by China's Global Times.
"But today, for the first time, I got to watch real robots fighting up close. Witnessing this historic breakthrough firsthand was completely different. The weight of the machines, the precision of their movements — it was incredible."
EngineAI founder and CEO Zhao Tongyang said the tournament aims to establish a globally recognized commercial humanoid robot fighting league while accelerating commercialization by testing technologies including structural balance, rapid decision-making and multimodal sensor coordination in real combat scenarios.
