{"id":178545,"date":"2026-02-15T01:47:24","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T01:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/178545\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T01:47:24","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T01:47:24","slug":"chinese-robot-boxing-draws-crowds-in-san-francisco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/178545\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese robot boxing draws crowds in San Francisco"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Super Bowl wasn\u2019t the only sporting event that drew excited fans to the Bay Area last weekend. An event at a much smaller venue in San Francisco was hailed as the future<\/a> of combat sports: virtual reality-controlled humanoid robots boxing in a cage.<\/p>\n

The match<\/a> was organized by Rek, a San Francisco-based company, and drew hundreds of spectators who had paid about $60\u2013$80 for a ticket to watch modified G1 robots go at each other. Made by Unitree<\/a>, the dominant Chinese robot maker, they weighed in at around 80 pounds and stood 4.5 feet tall, with human-like hands and dozens of joint motors for flexibility.<\/p>\n

The match had all the bells and whistles of a regular boxing bout: pulsing music, cameras capturing all the angles, hyped-up introductions, a human referee, and even two commentators. The evening featured two bouts made up of five rounds, each lasting 60 seconds.<\/p>\n

The robots pranced around the cage, throwing jabs and punches, drawing ohs and ahs from the crowd. They fell sometimes, and needed human intervention to get them back on their feet. Rek plans to put on more matches, and develop a league of robot boxers, including full-height robots that weigh about 200 pounds and are nearly 6 feet tall, founder Cix Liv told Rest of World.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now we are mainly focused on the U.S. But we will consider international matches after our next big event in a few months,\u201d he said, without giving details.<\/p>\n

The Rek match \u2014 the second in San Francisco \u2014 came just days before the world\u2019s first humanoid robot \u201ccombat league\u201d launched in China. Called the \u201cultimate robot knock-out legend,\u201d the competition combines \u201ccompetitive spectacle with technological challenges,\u201d according to a statement from Engine AI, a robot maker in Shenzhen. The champion team stands to win a prize worth about $1.4 million. Pictures from the launch showed Engine AI\u2019s full-height T800 robots that can kick, jump, and punch.<\/p>\n

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In China, humanoid boxing matches, races, and football games<\/a> have become common in recent years, with robot makers showcasing the skills of their latest products at the annual spring gala<\/a> to hundreds of millions of television viewers. In San Francisco, Rek isn\u2019t the only company capitalizing on the artificial intelligence boom and eager techies with cash to burn. Ultimate Fighting Bots<\/a> \u2014 claiming to be the world\u2019s first robot combat league with human pilots \u2014 also hosts game nights with Chinese robots.<\/p>\n

David Hatch, a San Francisco resident who works in tech design and is a science-fiction and design nerd, told Rest of World he enjoyed the Rek match. \u201cI do see more people really getting into seeing robots fight \u2014 you can see how the crowd here got excited, and there were some rousing moments,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can do a lot of things with robots \u2014 there can be a lot of customization, it can be a lot more participatory with VR glasses.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

While the Rek match and the URKL showcase robots far more advanced than those in BattleBots<\/a>, the 1990s American television show that featured fighting robots with weapons, much of it still remains \u201crobot theater,\u201d said Ken Goldberg, a professor of engineering and robotics researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are in the middle of the humanoid craze today; they look human-like and do some things, but they\u2019re not very sophisticated,\u201d he said at a recent briefing in San Francisco. \u201cMany of them have humans controlling them. Which is why I always tell people who are impressed with robot videos: Beware of what you see in the videos, it isn\u2019t quite real.\u201d<\/p>\n

China dominates the humanoid robot industry<\/a>, with nearly 90% of those sold last year made by Chinese companies including Unitree, AgiBot, and Engine AI. The firms use hundreds of workers<\/a> to generate the training data needed for the robots. A basic G1 is priced upward of $13,000, while a T800 costs more than $40,000. Most are used in research, retail, and for industrial purposes. A small number will end up in boxing cages in San Francisco.<\/p>\n

At the Rek match, the crowd cheered as a 13-year-old VR pilot named Dash beat his older competitor. Hatch stood and clapped: \u201cThat was awesome!\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hatch was also pleased that no one got hurt. \u201cYou can repair the damage more easily with robots,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Super Bowl wasn\u2019t the only sporting event that drew excited fans to the Bay Area last weekend.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-178545","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-francisco","8":"tag-san-francisco","9":"tag-san-francisco-headlines","10":"tag-san-francisco-news","11":"tag-sf","12":"tag-sf-headlines","13":"tag-sf-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}