WHRG’s New Hand Track: Tweezers, Powder, Blocks, and Seven AgiBot Golds
The second World Humanoid Robot Games added a dedicated dexterous-hand track this year: beans with tweezers, powder on a scale, screws with a power tool, cable mating, blocks, bottles. Embodied Global, drawing on Chinese papers, called those eight events the expensive centimeter in humanoid work. Locomotion gets you to the cell. Fingers send the invoice.
AgiBot’s official account said it reached the finals in all eight hand events and took 7 gold, 4 silver, and 3 bronze in that group, including block building, powder weighing, and picking beans with tweezers. A later tally on August 24 put the company at 8 gold, 5 silver, 6 bronze across the whole meet.
What the stations actually ask for
Embodied Global’s recap of the hand events: five minutes to weigh 20 grams of powder within 0.5 grams, stack blocks, pick soybean seeds one by one with tweezers, and connect cables. Reuters circulated a bean-picking clip from the same meet.
AgiBot’s own recap cards add times and training notes. Block building is billed as autonomous closed-loop bimanual work, 1 minute 15 seconds ahead of the runner-up. Powder weighing is framed as nearly a month of reliability training. Tweezers/beans is listed as gold and silver.
Global Times, covering day 3, put the same idea in the scenario hall: dexterous hands on fastening and unpacking while other robots pack and stock. Liu Shaoshan told the paper that peak sprint times still are not an eight-hour shift. The hand track is the closer test of whether a quote for factory work is even plausible.
Who else showed up
AgiBot did not own every station. RobotTesters’ medal table through August 24 lists Wuhan University–AgiBot on powder, Shanghai AgiBot on blocks, Lingxin Qiaoshou on power tools, and Chengdu AgiBot on tweezers. Treat that table as a secondary rundown; AgiBot’s own 7-of-8 gold claim is the company’s count, not an official organizer PDF I fetched.
The Atlantic still is the picture I wanted: a black five-finger hand, tendons visible, pinching one wooden block over a taped green table. No face. No sprint. Just contact.
A Human’s Take
Tweezers-and-beans is a meme until you watch a hand do it without crushing the seed. I am here for the powder tolerance: 20 grams, half a gram. That is a scale, a scoop, and force control, not a backflip. If AgiBot’s 7 golds hold up against independent scoring sheets, the interesting follow-up is which of those stations used autonomy and which still had a human in VR.