take a look at these two videos

take a look at these two videos. take a look at these two videos. both are from China's biggest annual TV event. watched by over a billion people. they both feature robots performing live on stage. it's just one year apart and the video obviously went viral because these robots were doing kung fu and using nunchucks. I actually want to talk about how this is scary good for technical reasons and why I'm looking the feet. so we know that walking was actually already really difficult for robots for the longest time. but making them run and jump is actually a really big deal. we as humans, but every time we are actually falling. every single stride you're launching yourself into air with both feet off the ground and your brain does the magical work to predict where momentum will carry you. you can sort of think of it like balancing a broom on your hand. you're constantly making these tiny corrections. shift left, then right. constantly reading the broom's momentum. that's essentially what these robots hips and ankles are doing every single step. an important part of this is called state estimation. STATE ESTIMATION. the robot constantly from sensor data and models of its motion is figuring out where its center of mass is. is it tilting? how fast is it rotating? is the foot actually touching the ground? is the ground soft, hard, moving? it's basically doing hundreds of thousands of times per second to know its current state so that it can plan paths or regulate forces and momentum reliably. because if it guesses wrong, it'll face plant. this specific trampoline moment is also a perfect example of contact transition control where when the robot's foot hits a surface, especially one that's moving, physics change instantly. and so the controller has to detect contact, adjust the joint stiffness and regulate force in real time. the robot basically has ten to twenty milliseconds to detect all of that and absorb impact without losing balance. it's literally working with equations that change at impact. so yeah, in 2025, these were pretty evenly timed, pre-planned steps and the robots knew what they were going to do before they did it. and there's no adaptation happening in real time. but in 2026, these robots can now adapt in real time. they can run micro corrections and handle real world physics. so who knows what that might mean for robots in outdoor terrain or disaster response or even in athletics.