{"id":40511,"date":"2025-12-10T18:31:44","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T18:31:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/ceo-of-chinese-robotics-company-posts-video-of-himself-getting-kicked-by-his-robot-in-effort-to-combat-skeptics\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T18:31:44","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T18:31:44","slug":"ceo-of-chinese-robotics-company-posts-video-of-himself-getting-kicked-by-his-robot-in-effort-to-combat-skeptics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/ceo-of-chinese-robotics-company-posts-video-of-himself-getting-kicked-by-his-robot-in-effort-to-combat-skeptics\/","title":{"rendered":"CEO of Chinese robotics company posts video of himself getting kicked by his robot in effort to combat skeptics"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69399f397ecd1d1da6634855?format=jpeg\" alt=\"The EngineAI T800 is pictured.\"\/><figcaption>EngineAI&#039;s T800 practiced its jabs and kicks on a punching bag.<\/p>\n<p>Screenshot via EngineAI<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>EngineAI posted a video of its CEO, Zhao Tongyang, being kicked in the stomach by its T800 robot.<\/li>\n<li>The Chinese company raised $180.69 million earlier this month, per PitchBook, and is one of several players in humanoid robots.<\/li>\n<li>Other competitors include Tesla and Boston Dynamics.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In a video posted to Instagram, EngineAI CEO Zhao Tongyang geared up in leg, stomach, and head pads. Workers taunted him, asking if he was nervous.<\/p>\n<p>The company&#039;s T800 robot then appeared to kick Tongyang in the stomach, and he can be seen falling to the ground.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Too violent!&quot; Tongyang said in a translation. &quot;Too brutal!&quot;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>        View this post on Instagram            <\/p>\n<p>A post shared by EngineAI (@engineairobot)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The video featuring its CEO came after EngineAI posted a separate video of its humanoid robot doing kicks and flips. Online skeptics made accusations that the bot in the video was CGI, so the company&#039;s next video showed the robot landing a kick to the CEO&#039;s stomach.<\/p>\n<p>In a comment under its latest video, EngineAI wrote that the startup was &quot;curious&quot; what it felt like for the T800 to kick someone, so they did an &quot;experiment&quot; to find out.<\/p>\n<p>The video has since amassed over 17,000 likes on Instagram. The first video, which was accused of being CGI, has over 42,000 likes. It is unclear whether EngineAI&#039;s T800 was tele-operated or moved independently.<\/p>\n<p>EngineAI raised $180.69 million in December 2025, per PitchBook, in a funding round led by Chinese investment groups HPR Capital, Tsinghua Holdings Capital, and Henan Investment Group.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;In 2026, the Zhongqing team will fully promote the scenario-based verification and large-scale deployment of the product,&quot; EngineAI commented on one of the videos. &quot;It will empower industrial upgrading with technological strength and reshape a new ecosystem of human-robot coexistence.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Morgan Stanley released a list of the 25 companies it predicted would dominate the humanoid robotics market, ranging from Nvidia to Sony. The investment bank estimated the market will be worth more than $5 trillion by 2050. EngineAI was not included on Morgan Stanley&#039;s list.<\/p>\n<p>Tesla&#039;s Optimus robot has also thrown some kicks and jabs. On the red carpet of &quot;Tron: Ares,&quot; Optimus performed Kung Fu with actor Jared Leto. On his third-quarter earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said that &quot;nobody was controlling&quot; the robot.<\/p>\n<p>Tele-operation is still common in humanoid robots. Neo, the laundry-folding and dishwasher-filling robot that went viral on X, still requires the control of a human outside the residence as it works on training it to perform more autonomous tasks.<\/p>\n<p>Many Optimus bots from Tesla are tele-operated, including the ones that were bartending at an event last year. The company is moving away from tele-operation-based training and toward collecting data using only cameras, Business Insider reported in August.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>EngineAI&#039;s T800 practiced its jabs and kicks on a punching bag. Screenshot via EngineAI EngineAI posted a video of its CEO, Zhao Tongyang, being kicked in the stomach by its T800 robot. The Chinese company raised $180.69 million earlier this month, per PitchBook, and is one of several players in humanoid robots. Other competitors include [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40512,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-40511","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40511\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}