In Beijing, 7,000 students are competing with humanoid robots — no remote controls allowed
The humanoid finals of the 28th China Robot and AI Competition opened August 1 at Beijing's Shougang Park, drawing over 200 university teams and more than 7,000 students from nearly 200 institutions, including Tsinghua and Harbin Institute of Technology. For the first time, every full-size humanoid event bans teleoperation: robots must complete industrial, home-service and elder-care tasks fully autonomously, on a 2,800-square-meter course that fits some 350 robots at once.
Why it mattersRemoving the human joystick turns a spectacle into a benchmark — the contest now measures what robots decide on their own. It also shows how deeply China's universities feed the humanoid pipeline, training students on full-stack autonomy rather than staged demos.
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