UFB Season 2: four teams, six stops, and dancing on the scorecard

Ultimate Bots announced its second season on 23 September, and the announcement changes what kind of league this is. Four permanent teams. Six events. A $100,000 prize pool. And points scored across three disciplines: martial arts, dancing, and an obstacle course.

That last sentence is the story. Season 1 was robot boxing — invite-only fights in the basement of Frontier Tower on Market Street in San Francisco, later at Temple SF, humans piloting Unitree G1s and Booster T1s with game controllers. Season 2 is a multi-discipline circuit in which a team's dancing counts toward the same season standings as its fighting. No other humanoid league scores anything but combat.

The circuit tours the tech industry's own stages rather than settling in a home arena: F1 Austin first, then TwitchCon, IEEE Humanoids, CES, Big Game Weekend and NVIDIA GTC. Only the opener has published dates — 21 to 24 October in Austin, per the league's site. UFB has not dated the remaining stops.

Every team fights on a league-assigned Unitree G1, so no entrant buys a robot. The league is recruiting two kinds of participant: pilots — athletes, gamers and performers who drive the machines, from the venue or from a browser anywhere — and what it calls Ghosts, the engineers running the Physical AI stack behind each robot.

UFB streams its events live on Twitch, where the league says its September fight night in San Francisco drew almost 300,000 live viewers — its own figure, not independently verified. It is the only league in this record with a working live channel in the West.

What has not been announced is most of what a viewer will actually want: the teams, their captains, fight times, and how points are split between punching, dancing and running an obstacle course. The league says teams and captains are "announced soon" and tickets are coming. This page will carry them when they exist.