In a now viral video, a man controlling a Unitree robot accidentally made the humanoid kick him right in the groin, forcing him into a groaning heap while painfully and visually embodying the promise and perils of advanced robotics.
“Yep, let’s go ahead and train our future AI overlords how to kick ass,” one X user quipped upon viewing the clip, which was originally posted on Christmas Day to the Chinese video sharing website Bilibili. “Maybe we do deserve to become made redundant.”
The video opens to the inside of a regular office space in what appears to be China and a man in a black motion capture suit standing next to a Unitree G1 robot, which follows his movements after a second or so of delay. The man squares up into a kickboxing stance and then starts pacing, shadow boxing, and kicking the air until the robot slips in front of him and kicks him in the nutsack, spurring both the man and the person holding the camera to groan in pain.
teleoperator kicking himself over not programming Asimov's Laws of Robotics…
Worth considering if we should base today's reality on the science fiction musings from the past.
Testing with humanoid robots is a very interesting new challenge. Historically robots have been… pic.twitter.com/1JB4KtlTh6 — Wes (@wmorrill3) December 26, 2025
The original poster to Bilibili wrote that the man in the motion capture suit was directing the robot’s own actions via use of a motion control model based on a neural network, and that’s why there’s a slight delay between the man’s actions and the robot’s movements.
“This delay will gradually decrease as technology advances, potentially reaching as low as 0.1 seconds,” the poster wrote on Bilibili.
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