Galbot says its robot completed more than 100 consecutive autonomous tennis rallies against former world number 15 Zheng Jie at the World Humanoid Robot Game<\/a>s in Beijing. The rally count, the autonomy claim and the robot\u2019s identity all rest on the company\u2019s own account.<\/p>\n A robot spent Saturday rallying with a former Wimbledon semi-finalist. The Beijing company Galbot says its machine sustained more than 100 consecutive exchanges<\/a> against Zheng Jie at the World Humanoid Robot Games, with no teleoperation and no script<\/a>ed sequence.<\/p>\n The described performance is not trivial. Chinese state media<\/a> reported serves above 100 kilometres per hour, and said the robot fell backwards on a high looping ball and got itself upright within seconds.<\/p>\n Tennis is a far better test than the sprint records set at the same event. A rally demands tracking a fast object, planning a whole-body response and adapting to an opponent inside a fraction of a second, which is closer to the problem Europe\u2019s robot makers have chosen than a straight line is.<\/p>\n Then there is the sourcing. The rally count, the world record framing and the no-teleoperation claim all come from Galbot\u2019s own press release, repeated by Chinese state broadcasters, with no independent audit and no published figures on interventions or success rates.<\/p>\n The opponent is worth stating plainly. Zheng Jie reached a career high of world number 15 and the Wimbledon semi-finals in 2008, and she retired from professional tennis a decade ago.<\/p>\n The larger gap is which robot this was. No account we could find names the model, and Galbot\u2019s commercial machine, the G1, is a wheeled dual-arm manipulator that does not have legs to fall over or stand back up on.<\/p>\n CGTN adds that the system was built with Tsinghua University. That is a research collaboration, which raises the possibility that the machine on court is not the machine the company sells.<\/p>\n What Galbot sells is unglamorous. The G1 works in warehouses, hospital pharmacies and more than 30 Chinese cities under the Galbot Store brand, on $800mn raised at a $3bn valuation, in a sector where rivals carry valuations above $2bn.<\/p>\n Europe is already inside that supply chain. Galbot lists Bosch among its deployment partners, alongside CATL, Toyota and Hyundai.<\/p>\n Bosch turns out to be on both sides of this race. The German group is also lined up to manufacture for Humanoid, the London startup that raised $152mn to build robots for factory work.<\/p>\n So the checkable version of this story is not on a tennis court. It is whether a wheeled robot restocks a pharmacy shelf for a year without a person fixing it, which is the thing Galbot actually sells and the thing nobody films.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n If you want to read more like this article, you can visit our Technology category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
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