The Games will feature two main categories and 32 events, divided into competitive and scenario-based contests.

The competitive category includes nine disciplines and 26 events, such as athletics, football, gymnastics, weightlifting, martial arts, street dance, sport dance, tug of war and pitch-pot. The scenario-based category comprises six events, covering home, hotel, industrial, emergency response, hospital and retail settings.

In the competitive events, alongside traditional highlights such as the 100-meter race, football and martial arts, the Games will introduce new contests including robot tug of war, which requires coordinated teamwork to generate maximum force; pitch-pot, derived from a traditional Chinese ritual and testing precision control and perception; and weightlifting, which challenges upper-body load capacity, showcasing the rapidly advancing overall capabilities of humanoid robots, Jiang Guangzhi, Party secretary and director of the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology, said.

Notably, robot football players this year are capable of dribbling while in motion and making diving saves, with their competitive level expected to advance from that of "preschoolers" to a "youth" stage, Jiang said.

The scenario-based events will also take place in real-world settings. New contests will be introduced across factory, hotel, home, emergency response and retail scenarios driven by practical demand, comprehensively testing humanoid robots' coordination of "brain, eyes and hands" in environmental perception, decision-making and precise manipulation.

The aim is to cultivate task-capable humanoid "workers" such as workshop operators, household assistants and firefighters, and to explore a new model that links competition with industry by "winning medals first, and securing orders", according to Jiang.

"The rapid progress of robotics has raised our expectations for this year's Games, and we expect robot athletes to deliver more impressive performances in three areas," Jiang said.

"First, it's about greater autonomy. The level of embodied intelligence has improved significantly, so the 100-meter race has been upgraded to a fully autonomous event, with rules also encouraging teams in scenario-based competitions to adopt fully autonomous approaches for positioning, recognition and operation."

"And, it's about greater dexterity. This year's events feature more tasks requiring fine manipulation, such as sorting clothes in home settings, firefighting in emergency scenarios and food preparation in retail environments.

Third, it's greater practicality. Scenario-based events will no longer be held in simulated venues but in real-world settings such as factories, hotels and model homes, enabling robots to autonomously and continuously perform long-horizon tasks in complex environments—moving from 'demonstration tools' toward 'practical productivity.'"

In addition to organizing the competitions, Beijing has rolled out supportive policies such as "first-use trials" for robots and a "challenge-based bidding" mechanism for key components.

The city is also advancing the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center to build four major platforms covering common technology R&D, embodied intelligence data, pilot testing and validation, and public industrial services. Multiple robotics industrial parks and pilot-scale testing bases are being developed across the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, alongside a government investment fund with a total scale of 100 billion yuan ($14 billion) to systematically support the growth of the humanoid robotics industry in Beijing.

Driven by targeted and sustained policy support, Beijing's robotics sector is entering a new wave of innovation, shifting from technological leadership to real-world application. The city's innovation ecosystem continues to improve, with breakthroughs across motion control, embodied AI models and biomimetic interaction, placing it among the national leaders in innovation density, Jiang said.