BEIJING, June 13, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — The 2026 Hitch Open Ping-Pong Embody AI Challenge (the “HOPE AI Challenge”) – created by the Intelligent Racing Foundation as a new physical AI competition in the Hitch Open World AI Championships – has been selected as an official competition of the Second World Humanoid Robot Games. The challenge will debut in August 2026 at the National Speed Skating Oval (Ice Ribbon), making one of the world’s fastest sports a proving ground for how well humanoid robots can see, decide and move.
The selection spans the HOPE AI Challenge from laboratory demonstrations to open competitions on one of the sport’s biggest international stages. It also extends the Hitch Open platform from AI racing to embodied AI and humanoid robotics, setting a new benchmark for physical AI competition worldwide.
The People’s Government of Beijing Municipality Announces the Ping-Pong Competition at the Second Press Conference of the Second World Humanoid Robot Games
Compete on the world’s largest stage for robots
The Second World Humanoid Robot Games – co-organized by the People’s Government of Beijing Municipality, China Media Group, the World Robot Cooperation Organization and the RoboCup Asia-Pacific Confederation Board of Trustees – will take place from August 22 to 26, 2026 at the Ice Ribbon. The program has been expanded to five days around a simple theme: more autonomous, more agile, more practical.
The Games are the world’s first comprehensive sporting event where humanoid robots are the athletes. The first edition attracted 280 teams and more than 500 humanoid robots from 16 countries and regions, generated 1.33 billion views on media platforms and received mainstream media coverage in more than 80 countries. Participation in the official competition lineup reflects the Games’ increasingly high technical bar – and makes the HOPE AI Challenge a front-row seat to how quickly humanoid robotics is developing.
The Hitch Open Ping-Pong Embody (HOPE) AI Challenge
Beiao Group: A world-class operations team
Behind the Games is an operational team with world-class credentials. Founded in 1994 and made up of the organizations behind the 1990 Beijing Asian Games and Beijing’s bid to host the 2000 Summer Games, Beiao Group is a state-owned municipal corporation in Beijing that has organized more than 150 major events – including the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games, the 2014 Beijing APEC Meeting, the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, the 19th Hangzhou Asian Games in 2023, and the first World Humanoid Robot Games in 2025.
That experience is important for something as unprecedented as the competition between humanoid robots. Beiao Group has built an end-to-end event infrastructure – from commercial development and match planning to technical support, venue construction and pre-competition training – so that every match is safe, professional and worth watching. The HOPE AI Challenge, jointly managed by the Intelligent Racing Foundation and Beiao Group, is designed to become a world-class, sustainable event.
The national skating oval (ice ribbon)
Why ping pong is an ultimate test of physical AI
Table tennis is brutally difficult for robots. The ball moves quickly, spins hard and lands unpredictably, leaving only milliseconds to react. The rules of the HOPE AI Challenge require complete autonomy – no human involved. Each robot must track the ball, predict its trajectory and spin it, choose a shot, plan its movement, coordinate its entire body and correct mistakes in real time. One slow or wrong step, anywhere in that chain, can lose the point.
That’s what makes ping pong such a revealing stress test for physical AI. It measures more than algorithmic precision: it measures whether a robot can translate perception into judgment, and judgment into fast, accurate, safe action, in a live environment that it cannot fully predict. Unlike scripted routines or remote-control demos, the HOPE AI Challenge tests what a robot can do completely on its own: the truest measure of physical AI in dexterous manipulation and embodied interaction.
AgiBot A3 demonstrates AI autonomous ping-pong
Hitch Open: Nature’s Arena for Physical AI
For years, the Hitch Open platform has pushed AI out of the digital world and into demanding real-world environments. In 2025, it turned the 99 hairpin bends of Tianmen Mountain in Zhangjiajie into a natural laboratory for autonomous driving, where nine university teams competed in conditions without GPS, poor visibility and slippery roads. In 2026, the HOPE AI Challenge expands that mission from speed to skills – from machines that move through the world to machines that communicate with it.
To have a real impact on the sector, Hitch Open has connected governments, universities, research labs, companies, investors and the public. The data and critical failure cases that emerge from real-world competition will drive iterations in robot hardware, sensors, controllers, algorithms, computers and safety systems – accelerating humanoid robots out of the arena and into manufacturing, healthcare, elderly care, commercial services and emergency response.
About Hitch Open AI World Championships
Hitch Open is the world’s first physical intelligence arena in the natural world, using extreme real-world scenarios to systematically test the safety, reliability and mitigation capabilities of AI autonomous driving and robotics. The platform has set global records in autonomous driving, vertical racing and humanoid robotics, and is committed to building an open, fair and collaborative ecosystem that brings groundbreaking technologies from the laboratory to the real world. Hitch Open is a trademark of Intelligent Racing Inc.: https://hitchopen.ai
Media contact
Intelligent Racing Inc. dba Hitch Interactive
E-mail: [email protected]
Beijing Beiao Group Co., Ltd.
E-mail: [email protected]
Photos accompanying this announcement are available at:
https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/910809ee-3ba7-48e3-b8ad-2c9fd7ad5e1b
https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/34135306-812f-4c5f-a4d3-6e88404ee1c4
https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/44effe44-a19d-406d-8299-6bb6088be8d9
https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/87830cc7-b038-408d-a9c5-a5ab67ec3914
