Over 500 robots competed in soccer, boxing, and running. In many cases, gravity was the real winner. This week, China’s leading robotics minds gathered in Beijing for a hotly-anticipated, Olympics-style event dubbed the world’s first “ Humanoid Robot Games. ”

The World Humanoid Robot Games have opened on Beijing. The event sees machines compete in sports such as soccer and boxing.

In a wave of new products and software characterized as an “artificial-intelligence comeback,” Apple appears to be jumping into about a half-dozen new industries at once. There’s a “tabletop robot that serves as a virtual companion” and looks like “an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel and reposition itself to follow users in a room,

Roboticists in China have developed a life-sized, furry, AI-enabled antelope designed to monitor the migration patterns of its real-life counterpart. This “bionic” antelope is part of a growing arsenal of somewhat convincing-looking robots used to observe wildlife in up close and personal ways human researchers often can’t.

The AI robotics firm Figure released an impressive video of its humanoid robot, Figure 02, autonomously folding laundry.

A human-sized patrol robot named Parker, meant to record and deter crime in Montgomery County parking garages, was sidelined late last month over privacy and transparency concerns.

This team of three robots are designed to survey and enter lava tubes, not just on Earth but on Mars and other planets as well. What kind of capabilities do they have that make the perfect team?