Hitch Open Ping-Pong Embodied (HOPE) AI Challenge Joins the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games, Seeding Advanced Physical AI Against Human Performance
BEIJING, June 13, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The 2026 Hitch Open Ping-Pong Embodied AI Problem (the “HOPE AI Problem”) — created by the Clever Racing Basis as a brand new bodily AI competitors league within the Hitch Open World AI Championships — has been chosen as an official competitors of the Second World Humanoid Robotic Video games. The problem debuts in August 2026 on the Nationwide Pace Skating Oval (Ice Ribbon), turning one of many world’s quickest sports activities right into a proving floor for a way nicely humanoid robots can see, determine, and transfer.
The choice takes the HOPE AI Problem from laboratory demonstrations to open competitors on one of many sport’s greatest worldwide phases. It additionally extends the Hitch Open platform past AI racing into embodied AI and humanoid robotics, setting a brand new benchmark for bodily AI competitors worldwide.
Folks’s Authorities of Beijing Municipality broadcasts the ping-pong competitors on the second press convention of the Second World Humanoid Robotic Video games
Competing on the World’s Largest Stage for Robots
The Second World Humanoid Robotic Video games — co-hosted by the Folks’s Authorities of Beijing Municipality, China Media Group, the World Robotic Cooperation Group, and the RoboCup Asia-Pacific Confederation Board of Trustees — runs August 22–26, 2026, on the Ice Ribbon. This system has been expanded to 5 days round a easy theme: extra autonomous, extra dexterous, extra sensible.
The Video games are the world’s first complete sporting occasion the place humanoid robots are the athletes. The inaugural version drew 280 groups and greater than 500 humanoid robots from 16 nations and areas, generated 1.33 billion views throughout media platforms, and earned protection from mainstream retailers in additional than 80 nations. Becoming a member of the official competitors lineup displays the Video games’ rising technical bar — and makes the HOPE AI Problem a front-row view of how briskly humanoid robotics is advancing.
The Hitch Open Ping-Pong Embodied (HOPE) AI Problem
Beiao Group: A World-Class Operations Group
Behind the Video games is an operations crew with world-class credentials. Beiao Group, based in 1994 and constructed from the organizations behind the 1990 Beijing Asian Video games and Beijing’s bid to host the 2000 Summer time Video games, is a Beijing municipal state-owned enterprise that has delivered greater than 150 main occasions — together with the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Video games, the 2014 Beijing APEC Assembly, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, the nineteenth Hangzhou Asian Video games in 2023, and the primary World Humanoid Robotic Video games in 2025.
That have issues for one thing as unprecedented as humanoid robotic competitors. Beiao Group has constructed end-to-end occasion infrastructure — from business growth and competitors planning to technical help, venue building, and pre-competition coaching — so that each match is protected, skilled, and price watching. Collectively operated by the Clever Racing Basis and Beiao Group, the HOPE AI Problem is designed to turn out to be a long-lasting, world-class signature occasion.
The Nationwide Pace Skating Oval (Ice Ribbon)
Why Ping-Pong Is an Final Take a look at for Bodily AI
Desk tennis is brutally onerous for robots. The ball strikes quick, spins onerous, and lands unpredictably, leaving solely milliseconds to reply. The HOPE AI Problem guidelines require full autonomy — no human within the loop. Every robotic should monitor the ball, predict its trajectory and spin, select a shot, plan its movement, coordinate its total physique, and proper errors in actual time. One sluggish or unsuitable step anyplace in that chain can lose the purpose.
That’s what makes ping-pong such a revealing stress take a look at for bodily AI. It measures greater than algorithmic precision — it measures whether or not a robotic can flip notion into judgment, and judgment into quick, correct, protected motion, in a reside atmosphere it can’t totally predict. Not like scripted routines or remote-controlled demos, the HOPE AI Problem exams what a robotic can do solely by itself — the truest measure of bodily AI in dexterous manipulation and embodied interplay.
AgiBot A3 demonstrates AI autonomous ping-pong
Hitch Open: Nature’s Area for Bodily AI
The Hitch Open platform has spent years pushing AI out of the digital world and into demanding real-world environments. In 2025, it turned the 99 hairpin turns of Tianmen Mountain in Zhangjiajie right into a pure laboratory for autonomous driving, the place 9 college groups competed below GPS-denied, low-visibility, and slick-road situations. In 2026, the HOPE AI Problem extends that mission from velocity to expertise — from machines that transfer by way of the world to machines that work together with it.
To ship actual affect to the business, Hitch Open has linked governments, universities, analysis labs, corporations, traders, and the general public. The info and circumstances of essential failures that emerge from actual competitors will drive iterations throughout robotic {hardware}, sensors, controllers, algorithms, computing, and security programs — accelerating humanoid robots from the world into manufacturing, healthcare, elder care, business companies, and emergency response.
About Hitch Open World AI Championships
Hitch Open is the world’s first bodily intelligence area within the pure world, utilizing real-world excessive situations to systematically take a look at the protection, reliability, and restrict capabilities of AI autonomous driving and robotics. The platform has set world data in autonomous driving, vertical-track racing, and humanoid robotics, and is dedicated to constructing an open, honest, and collaborative ecosystem that advances frontier applied sciences from the laboratory to the true world. Hitch Open is a trademark of Clever Racing Inc.: https://hitchopen.ai
Media Contact
Clever Racing Inc. dba Hitch Interactive
E-mail: media@intelligentracing.com
Beijing Beiao Group Co., Ltd.
E-mail: wangweiyi@beiao.com
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