I met a lot of strange robots at CES – here are the most memorable | TechCrunch

CES has always been a robotics extravaganza, and this year’s event saw the announcement of a number of major robotics developments, including the new production-ready debut of Boston Dynamics’ humanoid Atlas. Then there were all the robots on the showroom floor, where bots often serve as good marketing for the companies involved. While they don’t always provide a completely accurate picture of where the commercial stakes currently are, they do give visitors a taste of where it could go. And of course they are fun to watch. I spent quite a bit of time this week going through the bots on display. Here are some of the most memorable ones I came across.

The ping pong player

The movie Marty Supreme only came out a month ago, so I guess it’s only fitting that there was a ping-pong-playing robot at this year’s convention. The Chinese robotics company Sharpa had put together a powerful bot to play a game of table tennis against one of the company’s employees. When I stopped by the Sharpa booth, the robot was losing to its human competitor, 5-9, and I wouldn’t characterize the game that unfolded as particularly fast. Still, the spectacle of seeing a robot playing ping pong was impressive enough in itself, and I’m sure I’ve known some people whose paddling skills were basically equal to (or slightly worse than) those of the bot. A Sharpa representative told me that the company’s flagship product is the robotic hand, and that the powerful bot debuted at CES to demonstrate the hand’s dexterity.

The boxer

One of the exhibits that attracted the largest crowd involved robots from the Chinese company MotorAIthat develops humanoid robots. The bots, called the T800 (a nod to the Terminator franchise), were located in a mock boxing ring and outfitted as fighting machines. That said, I never saw any of the bots actually touch each other. Instead, they would be a kind of shadowbox near each other, without actually making contact. They were also a bit unpredictable. One kept walking out of the ring and into the crowd, which of course caused an uproar from the spectators. At another point, one of the bots tripped over his own feet and proceeded to lie face down on the ground, where he lay for a while before deciding to get back up. So not exactly a Mike Tyson situation, but the machines still managed to evoke some creepy human-like behavior that made for some high-quality entertainment. I heard one observer joke, “That sounds too much like Robocop.”

The dancer

Dancing robots have long been a fixture at CES, and this year was no different. This year, the dance movement torch was carried by bots from Unitree, a major Chinese robotics manufacturer has been scrutinized because of possible ties to the Chinese military. Unitree has made some impressive announcements about its product base, including a humanoid bot that can supposedly do just that running at speeds up to 11 mph. I didn’t see any evidence of anything nefarious at the Unitree stand this week – just a lot of bots having a go.

The supermarket clerk

I stopped by the booth of Galbot, another Chinese company that says it focuses on multimodal large language models and general-purpose robotics. Galbot’s booth was styled to look like a grocery store, and the bot appeared to be synced with a menu app. A customer came to the booth, selected an item from the menu, and then the bot went to pick up the selected merchandise for him. After I chose Sour Patch Kids, the bot dutifully grabbed a box from the shelf for me. According to the company’s website, the robot has been deployed in a number of real-world environments, including as an assistant at Chinese pharmacies.

The housekeeper

Creating a machine that can fold laundry has long been one of the core ambitions of the commercial robotics community. The ability to pick up and fold a T-shirt is taken into account a fundamental test of automated competence. For that reason, I was quite impressed by the exhibition at Dyna Robotics, a company that develops advanced manipulation models for automated tasks. There, a pair of robotic arms could be seen efficiently folding and stacking laundry. A representative from Dyna told me that the company had already established partnerships with a number of hotels, gyms and factories.

One of those companies, the representative said, is Monstrous laundrybased in Sacramento, California. Monster integrated Dyna’s shirt folding robot into its operations late last year and now describes itself as the “first laundry center in North America to introduce a state-of-the-art robot folding system from Dyna.”

Dyna also has some impressive support. It closed on $120 million Series A fundraising round in September this included funding from Nvidia’s NVentures, as well as Amazon, LG, Salesforce and Samsung.

The butler

I also stopped by LG’s CES branch to take a look at its new home robot, CLOid. It was cute, but it wasn’t the fastest bot around. You can read my full review of that experience here.