Beijing-based robotics company Galbot has won the gold medal at the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, held this month, after securing first place in the Robot Skills Competition. The event marked the first global contest to highlight robot productivity in practical scenarios.
Galbot outperformed 22 international teams, many of which relied on remote human control, by competing fully autonomously throughout the preliminary, semi-final, and final rounds. The company’s robot completed the final task in 10 minutes and 22 seconds, earning 336 points, which placed it 160 points ahead of the runner-up.
The competition’s pharmaceutical sorting challenge required robots to identify, locate, and retrieve medications from six multi-tiered shelves and deliver them to designated containers. Galbot successfully completed nine correct deliveries without human intervention. The task was designed to simulate real-world medical and retail environments, reflecting applications where the company’s robots are already in use.
According to Galbot, its robots operate autonomously in more than 10 smart pharmacies in Beijing, with plans to expand deployment to over 100 locations by the end of 2025. The company attributes the performance to its Sim2Real training method, which pre-trains models on synthetic datasets before fine-tuning them with a smaller amount of real-world data.
The World Humanoid Robot Games is the first international competition to focus on the practical deployment of humanoid robots in real-world tasks. Organizers have positioned the event as a benchmark for evaluating autonomous robotic systems in applied environments.
