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 allure of humanoid robots is their versatility – you can imagine them doing any job that a human can, simply because they have the same appendages.

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

The R1 certainly made an impressive entrance at the IFA 2025 tech show in Berlin, where it demonstrated its skills in the kitchen, cooking up shrimp – albeit at a very relaxed pace. Its makers say it could be put to work as a carer, nurse or tour guide.

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

Other events at the games included football and dance, and the Tiangong was by no means the only robot to suffer an injury: another dropped out of the 1500-metre event because its head came off.

The Qatari government was forced to ban the practice of using child jockeys in camel races in 2005 after pressure from campaigners, so fans turned to robots instead.

Initially, the devices were rudimentary contraptions cobbled together from electric drills and remote gate openers. They have grown more sophisticated over time, although they still amount to little more than remote-controlled whips to force camels to run faster.

Here, we see a race during an event organised by the Qatar Camel Racing Organising Committee in Al-Shahaniya, about 40 kilometres west of Doha, in January.

Some 12,000 humans and 21 robots competed in the Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half Marathon in April, seemingly the first organised event to allow runners whether they are made of flesh, metal or plastic.

Only six of the robots finished the distance, but the winner, a Tiangong Ultra, came in at a very respectable 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 bout between robots. The Unitree G1 robots that took part are rather slow, so their blows were more like a gentle push than a knockout punch. They also had a tendency to fall over when attacking or defending themselves, but they at least showed great agility and tenacity by getting back on their feet.

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

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