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Learn more about IEEE - Join the world's largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to this e-book plus all of IEEE Spectrum's articles, archives, PDF downloads, and other benefits. Learn more about IEEE - CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN JOIN IEEESIGN IN Close Access Thousands of Articles -- Completely Free Create an account and get exclusive content and features: Save articles, download collections, and post comments -- all free! For full access and benefits, subscribe to Spectrum. CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN RoboticsAIGuest ArticleHumanoid Robots A Challenge to Roboticists: My Humanoid Olympics A gold medal awaits the robot that can conquer doors, laundry, and peanut butter Benjie Holson 04 Nov 2025 7 min read Benjie Holson is the VP of Engineering at Robust AI. A collection of 8 video stills showing a man in a silver bodysuit doing tasks including picking up dog poop, wiping a window, peeling an orange, opening a door, using keys, having peanut butter on it's finger, holding up a dress shirt on a hangar, and cleaning a pan with a sponge. What will it take for a real robot to do all of these simple household tasks? Benjie Holson I was a little disappointed by China's World Humanoid Robot Games.^1 As fun as real-life Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots is, what people really care about is robots doing their chores. This is why robot laundry folding videos are so popular: we didn't know how to do that even a few years ago. And it is certainly something that people want! But as this article so nicely articulates, basic laundry folding is in a sweet spot given the techniques we have now. It might feel like if our AI techniques can fold laundry, maybe they can do anything--but that isn't true, and we're going to have to invent new techniques to be really general purpose and useful. With that in mind I am issuing a challenge to roboticists: Here are my Humanoid Olympic events. Each event will require us to push the state of the art and unlock new capabilities in robotic manipulation. I will update my Substack as folks achieve these milestones, and will mail actual real-life medals to the winners. Current State of The Art In order to talk about why each of these challenges pushes the state of the art in robotic manipulation, let's first talk about what's working now. What I'm seeing working is learning from demonstration. Generally, folks are using puppeteering interfaces. Most common seems to be two copies of the robot so that a human can grab and move one of them while the other follows, or a virtual reality headset with controllers for hand tracking. They then record some 10-30 second activity hundreds of times over. Fromm that data, a neural network is trained to mimic those examples. This technique has unlocked tasks that have steps that are somewhat chaotic (like pulling a corner of a towel to get it to lay flat) or have a high state space (like how a towel can be bunched up in myriad different ways). Thinking about this method of training robots to do things, it should be clear what some of the limitations are. Each of these has exceptions, but together they form a general trend. 1. No force feedback at the wrists.^2 The robot can only ever perform as well as the human teleoperating it, but we don't yet have good standardized ways of getting high resolution force information to the human teleoperator. 2. Limited finger control.^3 It's hard for the teleoperator (and for a foundation model) to see and control all of a robot's fingers with much more finesse than just opening and closing them. 3. No sense of touch.^4 Human hands are packed absolutely full of sensors. Getting anywhere near that kind of sensing out of robot hands in a way that's usable by a human teleoperator is not currently possible. 4. Medium precision.^5 Based on videos I've seen, I think we've got about 1-3 cm precision for tasks. Now, on to the events! Event 1: Doors Event 2: Laundry Event 3: Tools Event 4: Fingertip Manipulation Event 5: Wet Manipulation Event 1: Doors Things like doors are tricky because of the asymmetric forces: you need to grasp and twist the handle or knob quite hard, but if you pull hard outside of the arc of the door you tend to slip your grasp. Also, moving through a door requires whole body manipulation, which is more than I've seen from anyone yet. Bronze Medal: Entering a round-knob push door Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson I think this is very close to state of the art (or maybe it has happened and I didn't see it). I expect this medal to be claimed by December. Silver Medal: Entering a lever-handle self-closing push door Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson Adding self-closing makes this significantly more challenging because of the force involved, though the lever handle is arguably easier (I just don't see many round-knob self-closing doors).^6 Gold Medal: Entering a lever-handle self-closing pull door Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson The boss fight of doors.^7 You need to either use a second limb to block the door from re-closing, or go through the door fast enough to use dynamics. Event 2: Laundry We're just getting started on laundry. Bronze Medal: Fold an inside-out T-shirt Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson This is probably doable using the techniques we have now, but it's a longer horizon task and might require some tricky two-handed actions to pull the shirt through to right-side-out.^8 Silver Medal: Turn a sock inside-out Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson I think both the hand-insertion and the action of pinching the inside of the sock are interesting new challenges. Gold Medal: Hang a men's dress-shirt Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson The size medium shirt starts unbuttoned with one sleeve inside-out. It must end up on the hanger correctly with the sleeve fixed and at least one button buttoned. I think this one is 3-10 years out, both because buttons are really hard and because getting a strong, dexterous hand small enough to fit into a sleeve is going to be hard. Event 3: Tools Humans are creatures of technology and, as useful as our hands are, we mostly use them to hold and manipulate tools. This challenge is about building the strength and dexterity to use basic tools. Bronze Medal: Window cleaner and paper towels Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson The window cleaning fluid bottle is super forgiving in terms of how you grasp it, but you do need to independently articulate a finger, and the finger has to be pretty strong to get fluid to spray out.^9 Silver Medal: Peanut butter sandwiches Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson The challenge here is to pick up a knife and then adjust the grasp to be strong and stable enough to scoop and spread the peanut butter. Humans use a 'strong tool grasp' for all kinds of activities, but it's very challenging for robot grippers.^10 Gold Medal: Use a key Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson A keyring with at least 2 keys and a keychain is dropped into the robot's waiting palm/gripper. Without putting the keys down, get the correct key aligned and inserted and turned in a lock. This requires very challenging in-hand manipulation, along with high precision forceful interaction. Event 4: Fingertip Manipulation We humans do all kinds of in-hand manipulation using the structure of our hands to manipulate things that we are holding. Bronze Medal: Roll matched socks Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson Requires dexterity and precision, but not very much force. Silver Medal: Use a dog poop bag Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson When I use a dog-bag I have to do a slide-between-the-fingertips action to separate the opening of the bag which is a tricky forceful interaction as well as a motion that I'm not even sure most robot hands are capable of. Also tricky is tearing off a single bag rather than pulling a big long spool out of the holder, if you choose to use one.^11 Gold Medal: Peel an orange Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson Done without external tools. This is super tricky: high force yet high precision fingertip actions. Event 5: Wet Manipulation If you sit down and write out what you might want a robot to do for you, a lot of tasks end up being kind of wet. Robots usually don't like being wet, but we'll have to change that if we want to have them clean for us. And wet things can be difficult to grasp and use. Bronze Medal: Wipe a counter-top with a sponge Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson Mildly damp, but with exciting risk of getting the whole hand in the water if you aren't careful. Probably requires at least splash resistant hands (or a whole bunch of spares). Silver Medal: Clean peanut butter off your manipulator Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson This one naturally follows after the sandwich one. Water everywhere. Seems like an important skill to have after a few hours collecting training data on the dog-poop task. Gold Medal: Use a sponge to wash grease off a pan in a sink Your browser does not support the video tag. Benjie Holson Water, soap, grease, and an unpleasant task no one wants to do. Terms and Conditions To be eligible to win, a general purpose manipulator robot running autonomously must demonstrate successful task completion in a real-time video with no cuts. You are allowed a maximum of 10x the time I took to do each task (a 4 second task can take your robot up to 40 seconds). I reserve the right to be arbitrary in deciding if things aren't following in the spirit of the challenge. First robot to achieve this wins the prize! To claim your medallion email bmholson+olympics@gmail.com with an address for me to ship it to. If you give me a photo of your robot wearing a medal I will be tickled pink. I will also accept future challengers that are at least 25% faster than the current winner. Some medals have already been claimed; you can see the winning videos here. Good luck and may the odds be ever in your favor. Thanks to Jeff Bingham for advice, fact checking and cool robot videos. And thanks to my patient wife for spending an hour filming me doing silly things in a silly costume. Notes ^1 As far as I can tell, kickboxing was just the Unitree mini-humanoid robot, and everyone had the same code running, so... I guess it won? ^2 TRI has some pretty cool stuff with force control using a big training rig. ^3 Tesla's Optimus has 22 degrees of freedom using cable drives (cause you can't fit those motors in a hand). In 2008 I worked on this robot which also had 22 degrees of freedom and controlling it was crazy hard (as was keeping all the cables correctly tensioned). The other hand was a big two-finger gripper which I ended up using for most teleop tasks. ^4 Meta has been working with some in-finger vision systems which seem cool. ^5 This is likely more a teleoperation precision limitation than a model limitation. Here is a video of Generalist Robotics doing sub-cm precision tasks. I love that hockey sticks have become the traditional "mess with a robot" tool even for ridiculous things like this. ^6 Yes, I did wear this at my workplace in order to get this video. You're welcome. ^7 I have programmed (not trained) a general purpose mobile manipulator to pass through a self-close pull door, but it took over 4 minutes (disqualified for taking too long) and required a special doorstop. Also the video isn't public (also disqualified). Also it's really tacky to put up a competition and award yourself gold before it even starts. ^8 T-shirt starts fully inside-out in a wad. Finishes tolerably folded, right-side out. ^9 You must spray 3 good spritzes on the window, and wipe them up with paper towels so there are no ugly streaks. Paper towels start on the paper-towel roll, not pre-torn and pre-wadded. ^10 Peanut butter jar starts and ends closed. Sandwich should be cut in half. (Triangle or rectangular cuts are both acceptable, though your three-year-old might disagree). ^11 Mock poo allowed. Bag starts on the roll but can be in a standard dog-bag holder, held by the robot. This post originally appeared on General Robots, Benjie Holson's Substack about making a general purpose robot company. From Your Site Articles * DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials: What We Learned on Day 1 > * Will Robots Triumph over World Cup Winners by 2050? > Related Articles Around the Web * Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games - by Benjie Holson > * 1st International Humanoid Olympiad - Aug 29 - Sep 2, Olympia ... > * Watch robots compete at the World Humanoid Robot Games in China > humanoid robotsmobile manipulatorsrobot learning Benjie Holson Benjie Holson has been a roboticist since he first joined his high school robotics team, has programmed robots at startups and Google X's Everyday Robots and is currently VP of Engineering at Robust AI, where he hopes to someday ship boring-looking robots that solve real problems to customers who pay money for them. The Conversation (2) Francisco Lavin Francisco Lavin04 Nov, 2025 INDV I loved this! The robot's acting was excellent, and the special guest (the dog) did a great job too! I can't wait to see robots doing these Olympics! 0 Replies Hide replies Show More Replies Tagamachi Sakoshi Tagamachi Sakoshi04 Nov, 2025 INDV It's a good idea, and it would be entertaining to watch. Defining the arena is very important. Down to the cm of where things are placed, with perhaps some die rolls to select positions. It's just it might take decades to get to a robot maid that can perform such tasks economically. A category for wheeled AGV with 6 or 7 DoF arms has better chance of scoring some points. 0 Replies Hide replies Show More Replies A photo of 3 men. The InstituteIEEE Member NewsArticleCareers Get to Know the IEEE Board of Directors 1h 4 min read Two pairs of smart glasses, Halliday and the Xreal One Pro, against a solid background. Consumer ElectronicsFeature Two Visions for the Future of AR Smart Glasses 4h 8 min read Close-up of actuator device used for accelerated wound healing. 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