The best and most ridiculous robots of 2025 in pictures

This amazing humanoid robot is R1 from Robbyant, a company owned by Chinese tech giant Ant Group. The appeal of humanoid robots is their versatility: you can imagine them doing any job a human could do, simply because they have the same appendages.

But unlike wheeled robots, they have to balance on two legs, which is not an easy task. The R1 provides balance with its stable wheelbase and humanoid shape from the waist up.

The R1 certainly made an impressive impression at the IFA 2025 technology show in Berlin, where it showed off its skills in the kitchen by cooking shrimp – albeit at a very casual pace. Its creators say it could be used as a caregiver, nurse or guide.

This bipedal robot, called Tiangong, is more ambitious than R1, but as this image shows, it didn't necessarily pay off. Car, built by the National and Local Collaborative Robotics Innovation Center Embodied AI, was compete in the 100 meter dash at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August, he tripped and fell.

Other competitions at the games included football and dance, and Tiangong was far from the only robot to suffer an injury: another dropped out of the 1500m race because his head came off.

The Qatari government was forced ban the practice of using child riders in camel racing in 2005, under pressure from activists, fans turned to robots instead.

Initially, these devices were elementary devices. made from electric drills and remote gate openers. Over time, they have become more sophisticated, although they are still little more than remote-controlled whips that make camels run faster.

Here we see a race during an event organized by the Qatar Camel Race Organizing Committee in Al Shahaniya, about 40 kilometers west of Doha, in January.

Some 12,000 people and 21 robots In April, competed in the Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half Marathon, apparently the first organized event to allow runners regardless of whether they are made of flesh, metal or plastic.

Only six robots completed the course, but the winner, Tiangong Ultra, completed the course in a very respectable 2 hours and 40 minutes – albeit with three full sets of batteries, a privilege not afforded to human competitors.

Another World Humanoid Robot Games event featured one of the first ever robot kickboxing matches. The Unitree G1 robots that took part are quite slow, so their strikes felt more like a gentle push than a knockout blow. They also had a tendency to fall when attacking or defending, but they at least showed great agility and tenacity in getting back on their feet.

This tadpole is actually a cyborg with an electronic implant embedded inside it as an embryo. monitor the development of its neural activity how he grows into a frog.

Jia Liu of Harvard University and his colleagues used a soft material called perfluoropolymer to create a soft, stretchable mesh around ultrathin conductors, which they then placed on the neural plate – the precursor to the brain – of the African clawed frog (Xenopus levis) embryos. As the neural plate folded and expanded, the ribbon-like mesh became embedded in the growing brain, allowing the researchers to measure brain signals.

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• robotics/
• 2025 News Review