How ARC's humanoid robot fights work: three weight classes, a sensor-armoured ring and 150-second rounds

ARC, the Avatar Robotic Competition, has published a rule outline on its Gameplay page that is more detailed than most humanoid fighting leagues give. This piece sets it out as ARC states it on 27 October 2026. We have not verified that every element, such as the sensor armour, was used at ARC Night Singapore on 7 October, where ARC named no winner.

Who competes. ARC is presented by Katena, a company that describes itself as building "the operating system for avatar technology" and says its control software is hardware agnostic. ARC's Gameplay page says two enter as one competitor: a pilot and an avatar, and the pilot's name is the one on the card. The robot mirrors the pilot's full body, tracked through a VR rig or full-body motion capture. Pilot and robot face the same way.

Three weight classes. A small class covers robots under 1.2 metres and 40 kilograms, a mid-sized class 1.2 to 1.5 metres and 40 to 60 kilograms, and a full-sized class above 1.5 metres and 60 kilograms. A pilot can drive a robot of any class; only the avatar's size changes. The Singapore card, per ARC, paired an EngineAI T800 heavyweight bout with an Unitree G1 lightweight bout.

The ring. The robots fight inside an enclosed circular platform with a 1.5-metre radius. The pilots move on a 2-metre-wide outer track around it, so the fight is physically separated from the pilots without breaking the line between pilot and avatar.

Armour and scoring. ARC describes custom robot armour with embedded sensors that detect valid hits across three zones: the head, worth double damage, and the chest and abdomen, each worth standard damage. Each competitor has a health total shown on screen.

Rounds and winning. A round lasts 150 seconds and a match is best of three. A round ends when a robot's health reaches zero, which is checked first. If a robot falls, detected by its inertial sensor, it loses the round at once. At 150 seconds the robot with more health remaining wins the round; equal health is a draw, and both reaching zero at the same moment is a double knockout and a drawn round.

The benchmark. Separately from fights, Katena's benchmark games score a humanoid on six axes: speed, power, precision, stability, endurance and intelligence, the last defined as the share of match decisions made under AI. ARC calls this a public standard for comparing machines.

How autonomous? ARC's FAQ says balance, locomotion and low-level motor execution run autonomously, but every decision and action in a match comes from the human pilot, and nothing is scripted.

What is missing. The About page says "Coming soon". The next ARC Night has no date, with Dubai and the Americas listed only as in planning, and ARC's site carries a marketplace for robots and control equipment but no ticketing for a fight. The press page lists coverage by Reuters, the South China Morning Post and CNN en Español dated 7 to 9 October, as ARC's own listing; we have not checked those pieces.