Ultimate Humanoid Robot Knockout League
Shenzhen, 16 July 2026. One bout on record, and the most completely documented single bout in the sport. But the reason there is only one is not secrecy: URKL has published its qualifying rules in laboratory detail and has not published the format of the fighting tournament at all. Its own rulebook leaves that section as «to be announced».
Five rounds of five minutes, and each fighter carries timeouts: the broadcast caption counts them down. The T800 is the only machine allowed — the league designates it — and the armour is not: teams build their own, and it is part of what they are judged on. URKL calls its own principles open-source, jointly researched, fairly contested and «safe and non-violent», and bans destructive modifications outright, which is a striking position for the league whose viral moment was a decapitation. What it has not published is how the fighting tournament works. That section of its rulebook says «to be announced».
These are the rules of this competition. There is no such thing as “the rules of robot fighting”: every league writes its own, and that is why a bout here and a bout somewhere else are not the same event.
From the organiser's own rulebook. What it does not say, anywhere, is where the final is held: the Dubai venue that has been in circulation since the start appears in no document of theirs.
The top eight also get a fast track to EngineAI's final job interview, and every team in the top sixteen keeps a T800. Two figures have been in circulation for this prize — ten million and fourteen — and they were never in conflict: ten million is the champion's, the cash across the table is 13.2 million, and five limited-edition machines take the whole pot close to fourteen.
Before anyone fights, they have to get through this — and it is not a fight. Entries are judged by handing over a policy file: the technical judges load each team's policy into the competition's own MuJoCo image and score what it does there, not the video the team submitted. Three judges, averaged, with a review whenever one of them lands more than 30 % off the others. Get past that and the organiser lends you a T800 and pays part of your travel, and you are scored out of a hundred, in one attempt, on getting up off the floor — face down and face up, graded by the second — on walking over obstacle terrain, on four scripted strikes with a spinning kick worth double, and on measured punch and kick power.
The white machine against a rival half a head taller
47,3 s ·28 shots ·
Cut from 2 sourced recordings. Every shot in it is on the record. Cut from more than one URKL bout, so it hangs on the league rather than on either fighter's page.
How this league is documented, and where it is not. None of it is needed to follow the sport.
F-070 · F-073 · F-204 · F-207
Every figure on this page traces to one of these. The full entry for each — publisher, URL, date read and evidence level — is in Sources.
