13/07/2026

LYFE MONDAY | JULY 13, 2026

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Robots pour cocktails, run marathons, but still stumble at multitasking

THEY can mix cocktails, run marathons and fold laundry. But humanoid robots are still a long way from doing lots of different jobs on command, whatever the marketing says. The gap was easy to spot at the Robotics Summit in Boston in late May. The glossy brochures promised one thing. The people who actually build the machines said another. Elon Musk loves to show off his Optimus prototype, recently filmed jogging in short strides. Figure 03, a third-generation robot developed by Figure AI, can tidy and clean a living room by itself. China’s AgiBot and Matrix Robotics say their robots can greet visitors, serve coffee and give them a tour, a little like C-3PO from Star Wars . The reality is more modest. “Most of the humanoids you see are being teleoperated or they’ve got very specific paths and chores that they do,” said Chris Matthieu of startup RealSense, which makes cameras for robots. In other words, many are either run by a human with a remote control or stuck doing one narrow task. Take Neo, the robot that 1X launched with great fanfare last October. It was billed as “the world’s first consumer-ready humanoid robot designed to transform life at home” – but was actually steered by a person off to the side. Progress is real, though, and artificial intelligence (AI) is driving it. “I think AI has extremely accelerated that growth,” said William Okazaki of sensor maker Renesas. One big hurdle is the hands. Long the holy grail of robotics, they are getting close: Robots can now grip with a delicate touch, and some sensors can even tell when they are touching human skin. Much of this comes from a new kind of AI known as a VLA model, short for vision-language-action. It blends written instructions with what a camera sees in real time, so the robot can link what it is looking at to what it should do. There is also the “world model” – an AI that learns from vast amounts of images and video until it can

predict what will happen next in the real world, such as how an object will shift when it is squeezed. Hunt for data But an android that can do a bit of everything is still years off. “For general purpose robots, it will take longer,” said Daniel Fan of Innodisk, which makes parts for robots. Plenty of humanoids are already out in the world – Boston Dynamics’s Atlas at Hyundai, Hexagon Robotics’s Aeon at a BMW site – but these are trials, not final products. “Until you actually get the robot actually trying to do the thing you think it can do, you don’t really know,” said Charlie Kemp of Hello Robot, which sells robots for people with limited mobility. Running fully on their own, at scale, is not yet possible, “because there is not enough data”, said Xinrui Bi of AgiBot. To gather it, companies are setting up cameras everywhere to record human movement – from people cooking at home to workers in a textile workshop in India. The stakes are higher than for a chatbot such as ChatGPT. A robot acts in the physical world, so its mistakes can hurt someone. “If you want to move into a more social domain, it really has to be safe for the users around the robot,” said Valentino Fagard of Japan’s Xela Robotics, which works on giving robots a sense of touch. Engineers can set limits – telling the machines not to grip too hard or not to get too close to a person. But there is a catch. Like chatbots, these AI systems do not always behave the same way twice, which makes them hard to predict. “The issue with, call it the world model, or the end-to-end VLA, is they’re non-deterministic, they’re a black box,” said John Black of Brain Corp, whose robots stick to a very specific task, such as cleaning floors or checking store shelves. “They’re nowhere close to reaching the safety levels required,” he said, because even the people who build these systems cannot fully see why they do what they do. – AFP

Move over, Messi! o Engineers building machines able to defeat humans at football Robots take part in a football match at RoboCup 2026. – AFPPIC

T HIRTY seconds before kick-off, humanoid robot footballers in red and blue jerseys await the referee’s signal in the South Korean port city of Incheon. The match setting is RoboCup, branded as the world’s largest robotics competition, where engineers are betting on a fully autonomous robot team that can one day defeat the Fifa World Cup champions. Unlike remote-controlled machines, RoboCup’s robots make decisions on their own once a game begins, testing dramatic recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI). On the field one Friday, a referee shouted “Stop!” as a shot flew out of bounds – prompting every robot to freeze instantly. Moments later, one squad member – named “number one” – scored, to cheers from dozens of spectators. But then came a foul: One robot barges into the goalkeeper, sending it crashing to the ground. “You can’t do that,” one spectator laughed. Across Incheon’s Songdo Convensia convention centre, dozens of matches unfolded simultaneously as small, medium and large humanoid robots recently competed on compact pitches and spectators drifted from court to court.

better,’ and recognising players by their numbers. As the technology improves, I think fandoms will naturally emerge,” she said. That future may not be too far ahead. “We think robots can defeat humans by 2050. Recently there has been a big step forward in humanoid robot development. We have already seen one company here demonstrate a robot that can kick as hard as a human,” said Thomas Rofer, spokesperson for Germany’s B-Human team at the German Research Centre for AI. Researchers say advances in AI have dramatically accelerated progress in recent years. Morgan Stanley Research estimates that by 2050 around 930 million humanoid robots will be working in repetitive, structured tasks, with the global humanoid robotics market potentially reaching US$5 trillion (RM20 trillion). Unlike professional football, RoboCup offers no prize money, with university teams competing primarily to advance robotics research. But Shim In-wook, a smart mobility engineering professor at Inha University, believes robot football will ultimately become a sport in its own right. “In the Fifa World Cup, you might have one Lionel Messi. But once you build one Messi robot, you can build thousands more,” he said.

Founded in Japan in 1997, RoboCup has expanded beyond football into rescue, home service and industrial robotics while pursuing its long-term goal of building a fully autonomous robot team capable of defeating the Fifa World Cup champions by 2050. Although the robots play autonomously, human team members relay the referee’s commands – such as “stop” and “resume” – through software during matches, Lea Wedmann, of the Hamburg Bit-Bots team from Germany’s University of Hamburg, told AFP. Visitors said watching robot football felt surprisingly similar to viewing a human sporting event. “I had never seen robots playing football before. It was fascinating and really fun. When I first saw them, I found myself supporting the blue team because they looked a bit more human. They’re obviously not moving exactly like people yet, but they were much closer than I expected. Robot football has its own unique charm,” Cho Woo-cheol, a 45-year-old construction company worker, said. The Messi robot Another visitor, Kim Mi-hong, 60, predicted robot athletes could one day attract loyal supporters. “If they become really good, I think they’ll have fans. People were already saying, ‘The red team is

Robots have a long way to go before being practical enough for everyday usage. – 123RFPIC