A video showing a robotics engineer violently yanking a humanoid robot around by a chain wrapped around its neck is making its rounds on social media, prompting fears that he may be accelerating the inevitable robot uprising.
Footage shows the robot stumbling helplessly as it struggles to stay upright. A different clip shows the human engineer kicking the robot’s torso in an apparent attempt to knock it down to the ground.
“This guy is the first one to die in the robot uprising,” one Reddit user joked.
Disturbing optics aside, it’s an impressive demo that shows how far the balance and resilience of humanoid robots have come in recent years. For instance, we’ve seen robots pulling off some gnarly kung fu moves and boxing each other in the ring.
The latest video was originally shared by Tsinghua University PhD student Zhikai Zhang, who has been developing a humanoid motion tracker system called Any2Track in collaboration with Chinese robotics company Galbot, the same firm that recently opened a robot-run bodega.
The system “needs to operate stably in real-world scenarios against various dynamics disturbances, including terrains, external forces, and physical property changes for general practical use,” Zhang and his colleagues wrote in the project’s documentation.
The team deployed a “two-stage reinforcement learning framework” to teach the robot how to adapt to these disturbances — such as being kicked or jerked around with a chain — on the fly.
The results speak for themselves. The Unitree G1 bipedal robot refuses to lose its footing, despite its human master’s considerable abuse, maintaining an impressive degree of balance and composure.
It’s not the only self-reported incidence of human-on-robot violence lately. A separate video, which went viral earlier this month, showed scientists at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, simiarly kickboxing a Unitree G1 humanoid robot.
The bot shrugged off the attacks with little effort — once again demonstrating that humanity would be doomed in the case of a genuine robot uprising.
More on humanoid robots: When You Read the Fine Print, Humanoid Robots Are Going Absolutely Nowhere