But Patel observed that many of the robotic competitors were still being teleoperated by human operators who directly controlled the robots’ actions. The World Humanoid Robot Games allowed for human teleoperation of robots in certain events, but penalized the final score if robots were being remotely controlled rather than performing autonomously.

In other words, they know. The games preferentially favor fully automated bots. But that’s a really high bar, so they also don’t make you go home if your team can’t achieve that in every event.