It’s one small step for man — and one giant, badass layup for robot kind.
Researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have programmed a Unitree G1 humanoid robot to play basketball, almost perfectly mimicking the skills of a human athlete.
A video shared by HKUST PhD student Yinhuai Wang shows the robot dribbling, taking jump shots, and even pivoting on one of its feet to evade the student’s attempts to block it from taking a shot.
Wang called it the “first-ever real-world basketball demo by a humanoid robot,” boasting that he “became the first person to record a block against a humanoid.”
It’s an impressive demo, showcasing how far humanoid robotics has come in a matter of years. Unitree, in particular, has stood out in an increasingly crowded field, with its G1 rapidly picking up new skills.
We’ve seen the four-foot-four-inch humanoid perform impressive kung fu moves and easily shrug off a direct flying dropkick from an adult human. We’ve even seen two of them take each other on in a head-to-head kickboxing contest.
Wang and his colleagues are teaching robots how to play basketball through a system they’ve dubbed “SkillMimic,” which is described on his website as a “data-driven approach that mimics both human and ball motions to learn a wide variety of basketball skills.”
“SkillMimic employs a unified configuration to learn diverse skills from human-ball motion datasets, with skill diversity and generalization improving as the dataset grows,” the writeup continues. “This approach allows training a single policy to learn multiple skills, enabling smooth skill switching even if these switches are not present in the reference dataset.”
While netizens were generally impressed by the robot’s basketball skills, others were a little more skeptical.
“Love that the programmer focused on showboating rather than fundamentals,” one wrote.
“Robots will do everything but fill the dishwasher,” another joked.
Others imagined a future in which bipedal robots dominate sports.
“Man, I hope I get to see proper robotics basketball leagues,” another Reddit user mused.
More on the Unitree G1: Unstoppable Martial Arts Robot Can Take a Direct Dropkick Without Falling Down