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

Summary

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 unpredictab...