I met a lot of weird robots at CES — here are the most memorable

CES has always been a robot extravaganza, and this year’s event saw the announcement of a number of important robotics developments, including the new, production-ready debut of Atlas, the humanoid from Boston Dynamics. Then there were all the robots on the showroom floor, where bots often serve as good marketing for the companies involved. If they don’t always give a totally accurate representation of where commercial deployment is at the moment, they do give visitors a peek at where it might be headed. And, of course, they sure are fun to look at. I spent a decent amount of time perusing the bots on display this week. Here are some of the most memorable ones I encountered.

The ping pong player

The movie Marty Supreme just came out a month ago, so I guess it’s only appropriate that there was a ping-pong-playing robot at this year’s convention. The Chinese robotics firm Sharpa had rigged up a full-bodied bot to play some competitive table tennis against one of the firm’s staff. When I stopped by the Sharpa booth, the robot was losing to its human competitor, 5-9, and I would not characterize the game that was occurring as particularly fast-paced. Still, the spectacle of seeing a robot play ping pong was impressive enough on its own, and I’m sure I have known some humans whose paddle skills were basically equivalent to (or slightly worse than) the bot’s. A Sharpa rep told me that the company’s main product is its robotic hand, and that the full-bodied bot had been debuted at CES to demonstrate the hand’s dexterity.

The boxer

One of the exhibits that drew the largest crowds involved robots from the Chinese company EngineAI, which is developing humanoid robots. The bots, dubbed the T800 (a nod to the Terminator franchise), were in a mock boxing ring and were styled as fighting machines. That said, I never saw any of the bots actually hit each other. Instead, they would sort of shadowbox near each other, never actually making contact. They were also a little unpredictable. One kept walking out of the ring and into the audience, which naturally got a rise out of onlookers. At another point, one of the bots tripped over its own feet and then face-planted on the floor, where it lay for awhile before it decided to get up again. So, not exactly a Mike Tyson situation, but the machines still managed to evoke a spooky kind of humanoid behavior that made for high-quality entertainment. I overheard an observer quip: “That’s too much like Robocop.”

The dancer

Dancing robots have long been a staple at CES, and this year was no different. This year, the dance-move torch was carried by bots from Unitree, a major Chinese robotics manufacturer that has been scrutinized for potential ties to the Chinese military. Unitree has made a number of impressive announcements about its product base, including a humanoid bot that can supposedly run at speeds of up to 11 mph. I didn’t see any evidence of anything nefarious at Unitree’s booth this week—just a lot of bots that were feeling the groove.

The convenience store clerk

I stopped by the booth for Galbot, another Chinese company that says it is focused on multi-modal large language models and general purpose robotics. Galbot’s booth had been styled to look like a convenience store, and its bot appeared to have been synched with a menu app. A customer would come to the booth, select an item from the menu, and then the bot would go and fetch the selected merch for them. After I chose Sour Patch Kids, the bot dutifully retrieved a box off the shelf for me. According to the company’s website, the robot has been deployed in a number of real-world settings, 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 a T-shirt and fold it is considered a fundamental test of automated competence. For that reason, I was fairly impressed by the display over at Dyna Robotics, a firm that develops advanced manipulation models for automated tasks. There, a pair of robotic arms could be seen efficiently folding laundry and placing it in a pile. A Dyna representative told me that the firm had already established partnerships with a number of hotels, gyms, and factories.

One of those businesses, the rep told me, is Monster Laundry, based 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 debut a state-of-the-art robotic folding system from Dyna.” 

Dyna also has some impressive backing. It concluded an $120 million Series A fundraising round in September that included funding from Nvidia’s NVentures, as well as from Amazon, LG, Salesforce, and Samsung.

The butler

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