CES has always been a robot extravaganza, and this year’s event saw the announcement of several major robotics advances, including the new, production-ready debut of Atlas from Boston Dynamics. Then there were all the robots on the showroom floor, where bots often serve as good marketing for the companies involved. If they don’t represent a completely accurate representation of where the commercial deployment is right now, they give visitors a peek at where it might be headed. And, of course, they sure are fun to watch. I spent a decent amount of time using the bots on display this week. Here are some of the memorable ones I encountered.

Ping pong player

The movie Marty Supreme It just came out a month ago, so I guess it’s only fitting that there was a ping pong-playing robot at this year’s convention. Chinese Robotics firm Shara A full body bot was developed to play some competitive table tennis against one of the firm’s staff. When I stopped by the Sharpa booth, the robot was losing to its human opponent, 5-9, and I wouldn’t characterize the game as particularly fast-paced. Still, the spectacle of watching a robot play ping-pong was impressive enough on its own, and I’m sure I’ve known a few humans whose paddle skills were basically equal to (or slightly worse than) the bot’s. A Sharpa representative told me that the company’s flagship product is its robotic hand, and that a full-body bot was launched at CES to demonstrate the hand’s dexterity.

Boxer

An exhibit that included the Chinese company’s biggest crowd-pleaser robot Engineeringwhich is developing humanoid robots. The bots, dubbed the T800 (a nod to the Terminator franchise), were in a mock boxing ring and were styled as fighting machines. That said, I’ve never seen any bots kill each other. Instead, they will be like a shadow box near Each other, never actually contact. They were also a bit unpredictable. One walked out of the ring and into the audience, which naturally got a standing ovation from the spectators. At another point, one of the boots hit his feet and then fell face down on the floor, where he lay for a while before deciding to get up again. So, not exactly a Mike Tyson situation, but the machines still managed to evoke a creepy kind of human behavior that made for high-quality entertainment. I heard one observer quip: “It’s too much like RoboCop.”

Dancer

Dancing robots have long been a staple at CES, and this year was no different. This year, the DanceMove torch was picked up by bots from Unitary, a major Chinese robotics manufacturer. Checked For possible ties to the Chinese military. Unitary has made a number of impressive announcements about its product base, including a humanoid bot that can make predictions. Drive at 11 mph. I saw no evidence of anything of the sort at Unitary’s booth this week – just lots of bots feeling the groove.

Convenience store clerk

I stopped by the booth for Gelbot, another Chinese company that says it’s focused on multi-party language models and general-purpose robotics. Gallbot’s booth was styled to look like a convenience store, and its bot menu synced with the app. A customer would come to the booth, select an item from the menu, and then the booth would go and take away their chosen chili. When I selected Sour Patch Kids, the bot dutifully retrieved a box from the shelf for me. According to the company’s website, the robot has been deployed in a number of real-world settings, including as an assistant In Chinese pharmacies.

The maid

Building a machine that can fold laundry has long been one of the primary ambitions of the commercial robotics community. The ability to take a t-shirt and fold it is considered A basic test For this reason of automation, I was quite impressed by the display at Dyna Robotics, a firm that develops advanced manipulative models for automated tasks. There, a pair of robotic arms can be seen efficiently folding and stacking laundry. A Dyna representative told me that the firm has already partnered with several hotels, gyms and factories.

One of those businesses, the representative told me, is Monster Laundrybased in Sacramento, California. Monster integrated Dyna’s shirt-folding robot into its operations late last year and now describes itself as “the first laundry center in North America to debut the state-of-the-art robotic folding system from Dyna.”

Diana also has some impressive backing. It ended up being $120 million Series A Fundraising Round In September it included funding from NVIDIA’s Ventures as well as Amazon, LG, Salesforce, and Samsung.

Butler

I also stopped by LG’s section of CES to take a look at its new home robot, Clyde. It was cute but not the fastest boot on the block. You can read my full review of the experience here.