A humanoid robot weighing 37.15 kg pulled a 1,434 kg car 9.92 metres on two legs in Beijing, setting a Guinness World Record for the heaviest vehicle pulled by a humanoid robot under 40 kg, its developers said.
The robot was powered by Thor, a whole-body control model jointly developed by Chinese robotics firm XYZ Embodied AI Co. (XYZ), Ltd. and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI). The challenge took place in Beijing’s Yizhuang.
Developers said the feat was not merely a display of brute force. The core difficulty was maintaining balance and coordinating the whole body while withstanding a large, changing external force. Unlike running, jumping or dancing, pulling a car is a strong-interaction task: the robot’s movement changes contact forces, which in turn affect posture and gait.
Thor uses a force-adaptive torso-tilt reward, or FAT2, based on quasi-static torque balance. It adjusts the robot’s horizontal centre-of-mass offset according to the load, mimicking how humans lean and shift their weight when dragging heavy objects. The model also uses a body-part-factorised policy architecture, with separate lower-body, waist and upper-body policies that share whole-body observations and are trained jointly.
In real-robot tests, peak pulling force reached 167.7 newtons, about 48% of the robot’s body weight. Overall performance improved 68.9% over a baseline, with the FAT2 reward contributing 80% to 90% of the gain, the team said.
The developers have also tested the control system on opening a fire door requiring about 60 newtons, dragging an 85 kg rack and wiping a whiteboard. They said such capabilities could be relevant for factory logistics, warehouse handling, service work and rescue operations, where robots must maintain stability while physically interacting with their environment.
The record is a boundary test rather than a near-term commercial use case. Its longer-term value will depend on whether the underlying capabilities can be turned into reusable, reliable work across different loads, contact modes and environments, the developers said.
the 2026 Bund Summit