Humanoid Robot Knocks Out Human Fighter in US Cage Match

A San Francisco-based company, REK, hosted what it claims to be the first human vs. humanoid robot MMA cage match in the United States in September. In a video of the bout, human fighter Frankie Lapena faced a humanoid robot named "Predator." Lapena initially gained the upper hand and knocked the robot to the ground, but the robot quickly got up and finished the fight with a combination of punches, knocking out the human fighter. The robot then performed a celebratory pose.

The robot is believed to be Unitree's H2 Plus humanoid robot, based on its appearance and details. Unitree and Nvidia announced in June 2026 a collaboration on the H2 Plus reference design, with Unitree's marketing director saying the product would launch in the second half of 2026. The H2 Plus features dual SharpaWave tactile five-fingered dexterous hands with 22 degrees of freedom in each hand and 75 in total, arm torque up to 120 Nm, leg torque up to 360 Nm, and a battery life of about 3 hours. It is powered by a Blackwell GPU delivering 2070 FP4 TFLOPS, a 14-core Arm CPU, and 128GB unified memory.

The robot was not fully autonomous during the fight; a human operator controlled it in real time via a VR headset and motion controller, while the robot handled balance and posture correction. REK had previously released a teaser showing a 1.83-meter T800 robot fighting a human, hinting at more footage to come.