TNS
Boston is turning marathon weekend into a glimpse of the future, with humanoid and quadruped robots racing in the city’s Seaport as part of America’s first professional robotics sports league.
Could this robot race become the next Boston Marathon?
Author: Scott Kirsner
Just 15 runners lined up at the starting line for the first Boston Marathon in 1897.
David Grilk hopes to get nearly that many robots to participate in a race he’s planning for Sunday, April 19, in Boston’s Seaport. There are two categories: humanoids and quadrupeds, and Grilk has been working to recruit the best American- and Chinese-made bots he can find. There’s no pre-race carb loading for this cohort; instead, they’ll make sure their batteries are topped off.
Grilk plans this as the first competition organized by his new Professional Robotics League, which he launched earlier this year after leaving the event-planning firm Conventures. At that company, he was the director of sports events, overseeing the J.P. Morgan Corporate Challenge and several Boston Marathon-related events, including the expo at the Hynes Convention Center.
His father, Tom Grilk, who retired in 2022 as CEO of the Boston Athletic Association, serves as an advisor to the new league.
Two local investors, Alex Wissner-Gross and Devon Triplett, have provided funding for the new league through their firm 021T Capital Management. In a recent blog post, Wissner-Gross noted that China is already using robot races, such as the World Humanoid Robot Games, to provide a public showcase for its bots and accelerate technological progress. That 2025 competition included robot soccer, kickboxing and running.
“The United States,” he wrote, “has nothing comparable. We have combat robotics (BattleBots, NHRL), educational competitions (FIRST), academic research tournaments (RoboCup) and drone racing (Drone Racing League). What we don’t have is a professional sports league for humanoid and quadruped robots competing for a mass audience.”
One of the bots that will compete in Sunday’s race was at an artificial intelligence conference Friday, wearing a T-shirt and runner’s bib to promote the event, but I didn’t get a chance to see it. I arrived late, and the bot had run out of juice.
Sunday’s course will be far shorter than 26.2 miles: just 50 meters. In addition to a basic dash, there will also be heats involving an obstacle course, and running the course forward and then backward, Grilk said. The event is free to attend. Grilk is getting support from the real estate developer WS Development and MassRobotics, an incubator for robotics companies, but he hasn’t yet signed on some of the area’s big robot makers, like Boston Dynamics or Amazon Robotics.
Grilk said that one goal of the contest is to show that robots can be safe around humans. Combat-style robot competitions send the opposite message.
He hopes to attract some of the human runners who are in town for Monday’s marathon. They typically spend Sunday resting and exploring the city.
Boston is a natural place to launch a new professional league, he said. “One, it’s the city of champions with sports teams, but in robotics, it’s one of the biggest hubs in the world.”
“We look at this year as our R&D year, where we’ll see what works well, what doesn’t, what competition formats, what do people find engaging,” Grilk said. Eventually, he hopes to have “more competitors, more competition styles and things that create rivalries.”
“I give these guys credit for trying to be ambitious,” said Michael Quan of 3D Cowboys, who expects to participate on Sunday. Quan is confident his four-legged Spot robot, made by Boston Dynamics, will perform well on the course. (He noted that there isn’t yet a prize purse at Professional Robotics League events.)
But he was a little worried about one thing that human marathon runners can still handle much better than robots: rain.
Credits: TCA, LLC.