Ninety Robot Teams Climbed 3,100 Stone Steps on Mount Tai: Unitree G1 Overheated and Quit, a Suzhou Underdog Won Twice

On Sunday, nearly 90 teams gathered in Tai'an, Shandong, for China's first CMG World Robot Mount Tai Competition, a race up roughly 3.9 kilometers of the mountain's famous stone stairway with more than 3,100 steps. State broadcaster China Media Group set up four official events: humanoid speed racing, quadruped speed racing, quadruped load-carrying, and exoskeleton assistance, plus an all-terrain challenge.

The most famous entrant did not finish. Unitree's G1 humanoid, the development version of the robot that performed at the Spring Festival Gala, fielded by the Yongda Zhicheng team, overheated midway up the course. Its operator pulled it out for safety reasons, and staff carried the robot back down on a stretcher, images that spread rapidly across Chinese social media.

The double winner came from outside the headline names. The Zhishen Lingyue team, running a humanoid built by Suzhou-based GENISOM AI, took the main speed segment from Hongmen to Doumu Palace in 27 minutes 26 seconds, then won the challenge segment from Doumu Palace to Hutian Pavilion in 55 minutes 34 seconds.

In the quadruped events, Beijing's Lingyi Technology won the speed race with a Unitree A2 in 43 minutes 41 seconds, while the Lingsi Intelligent team took the load-carrying title with 400 points in 1 hour 51 minutes 29 seconds. Results for the exoskeleton and all-terrain challenge events had not been announced as of press time.

GENISOM AI, founded in December 2023, builds embodied intelligence models, humanoids, quadrupeds, joint modules and software tooling. The company says cumulative production passed 15,000 units by June 2026 with monthly output up more than tenfold year over year, and in September it raised a nine-figure yuan B round led by the UAE's Stone Venture. Those production figures are company-reported.

What the race really tested was endurance, not cleverness. Three thousand real stone steps, variable gradient, outdoor heat and continuous legged locomotion are a far harsher benchmark than a lab demo floor, and the most visible failure mode was thermal, not software. China's growing circuit of robot spectacle races doubles as a marketing channel, and results like this one show the competitive field is considerably wider than the two or three names that dominate viral clips.