The best and most ridiculous robots of 2025 in pictures

This striking humanoid robot is the 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 can do, simply because they have the same appendages.

But unlike wheeled robots, they have to deal with balancing on two legs, which is no easy feat. The R1 strikes a balance, with a stable wheeled base and a humanoid shape from the waist up.

The R1 certainly made a splash at the IFA 2025 tech show in Berlin, where it demonstrated its kitchen skills by cooking shrimp – but at a very relaxed pace. Its creators claim that it could be used as a caregiver, nurse or tourist guide.

This bipedal robot, called Tiangong, is more ambitious than the R1 – but as this image shows, it hasn’t necessarily paid off. The machine, built by the National and Local Co-Built AI Robotics Innovation Center, was competing in a 100-meter race at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August when it tripped and fell.

Other events in the games included soccer and dancing, and the Tiangong was by no means the only robot to suffer an injury: another dropped out of the 1,500 meter event because its head came off.

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

Initially, the devices were rudimentary contraptions cobbled together from electric drills and remote door openers. They have become more sophisticated over time, although they are still simple remote-controlled whips to force camels to run faster.

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

Some 12,000 humans and 21 robots took part in Beijing’s E-Town humanoid robot half marathon in April, apparently the first organized event to allow runners, whether flesh, metal or plastic.

Only six of the robots completed the distance, but the winner, a Tiangong Ultra, clocked a very respectable time of 2 hours 40 minutes – albeit with three full sets of batteries, which is a privilege not afforded to human participants.

Another event at the World Humanoid Robot Games saw one of the first ever kickboxing fights between robots. The Unitree G1 robots that participated are rather slow, so their punches felt more like a light push than a punch. They also had a tendency to fall when attacking or defending themselves, but they at least showed great agility and tenacity when getting back on their feet.

This tadpole is actually a cyborg, with an electronic implant embedded inside like an embryo to monitor the development of its neural activity as it transforms into a frog.

Jia Liu of Harvard University and colleagues used a flexible material called perfluropolymer to build a soft, stretchable mesh around ultra-thin conductors, which they then placed on the neural plate – the precursor to the brain – of an African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) embryos. As the neural plate folded and expanded, the ribbon-like mesh was integrated into the growing brain, allowing researchers to measure brain signals.