GHOST TRIAL
powered by
July 18 – August 18, 2026 · $3,000 in cash
Trial 03 — The SuperSONIC Challenge: Teach a humanoid a move it can't do yet. Every month brings a new trial; the strongest ghosts get drafted for Season 2. Creating an account is the registration — everything else happens in the portal.
League robots: Unitree G1, Booster K1, Agibot X2, LeRobot SO-101.
Three tracks, one prize each
$1,000 per track. Enter one, or all three.
Martial Arts
Strikes, kicks, throws, forms — teach the G1 combat movement the stock model can't perform. The harder and more original the move, the higher it scores.
Performance Arts
Dance, gymnastics, expressive and character movement. If it belongs on a stage, it belongs here.
Experimental
Novel locomotion, sport-specific skills, and the edge of what's physically possible.
Five steps to a new move
Registering is just creating an account — Google and Discord sign-in both work. Set your team name in the portal's Ghost Trial section (a team of one still picks a name), then submit there and update your entry any time until the close.
Pick your move
Anything a G1 can physically do but the stock model can't — strikes, kicks, throws, dance, character movement. Harder and more original scores higher.
Build the dataset — the real work
Generate synthetic motion with Kimodo text-to-motion in Ultimate Bots Studio, augment BONES-SEED or LAFAN, lift motion from video, or capture your own — source anywhere you're licensed to.
Convert to SONIC's format
Run your motions through the starter scripts to get them into the format the training recipe expects.
Fine-tune from the released checkpoint
Start from the released SONIC checkpoint with the provided recipe — you're adapting a model, not training one from scratch.
Show the improvement in simulation
Demonstrate your move landing in simulation, side by side against the stock baseline.
- SONIC checkpoint + fine-tuning recipe — the released whole-body control model, with a ready-to-run recipe.
- Starter scripts — dataset conversion, training, eval, and export.
- Practice motion set + WBT-Bench — opens late July; score yourself before submitting.
- Kimodo text-to-motion in Ultimate Bots Studio — generate synthetic motion from prompts.
- BONES-SEED pointer — 142k motions; access via Bones Studio.
Credit “Motion Data by Bones Studio” when you post your work publicly ↗ - $50 Nebius compute — sized for a focused fine-tune from the released checkpoint.
- Discord — announcements, help desk, and office hours through the window.
- Your fine-tuned policy, exported to ONNX.
- The dataset you built, and how you made it.
- Your training config — the run must be reproducible.
- A short demo video in simulation.
- A before/after against the stock baseline.
The checklist maps 1:1 to the loadout slots in the portal's Ghost Trial section — fill each slot and you're in.
Judges decide, the bench keeps score
Judges make the final call per track. WBT-Bench is the objective backbone; the rest is what a score can't capture.
WBT-Bench score
The objective backbone — SONIC's tracking reward, with penalties for flailing, self-collision, and jitter, plus a fundamentals check: walking, turning.
Difficulty & originality
How hard and how new is the move you chose.
Execution
How completely it lands — clean, physically real, reliable.
Pipeline cleanliness
The quality of your dataset, config, and reproducibility.
- Open worldwide. Solo or teams up to 4. Free to enter.
- You keep ownership of everything you create — dataset, code, model. Open-sourcing is encouraged, never required.
- Winners grant Ultimate Bots the right to run the winning skill on real robots and across our channels — that's how your work gets on stage.
- You're responsible for your licenses. Build only on models and data whose terms permit it; some datasets are free only for non-commercial or small-company use.
- The fine print: entries and prizes are subject to standard eligibility verification, official rules, and applicable law.
Questions
Do I need a robot?
No. Everything runs in simulation — we handle real-robot deployment for winners.
Do I need to travel?
No. The trial is fully online — winning and deployment don't require travel.
Can I enter multiple tracks?
Yes — submit to each separately, judged independently.
When do submissions open?
In the portal — sign in and open Ghost Trial.
Does $50 of compute actually cover it?
Yes for the intended scope: you're fine-tuning from a released checkpoint, not pretraining. Spend your effort on data.
Who owns my work?
You do. See Rules & ownership.
Register as a ghost
Creating an account is the registration. Sign up with Google or Discord, open the Ghost Trial section in the portal to set your team name, and submit your entry there — update it any time until the close.
Creating an account is the registration — sign up with Google or Discord. Already registered? Sign in
