BEIJING — It was not even close as a bright red Chinese humanoid named “Lightning” lived up to its name in a half-marathon pitting humans against robots, smoking its competition on Sunday

Tech firms aim to trigger a robot revolution with video of humans doing housework. Gig workers are paid up to $25 an hour to film themselves doing various tasks.

Social by nature, humans interact in multiple ways—through voice, vision and touch. Reflecting these humanistic qualities, robotic capabilities are improving, and as such, human-robot interaction will feature more complex multimodal functions. However ...