Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
Robotics China

Humanoid Robots Run 100 Meters Faster Than Usain Bolt's Record Pace (engadget.com) 65

Posted by BeauHD from the nightmare-fuel dept.
Two humanoid robots competing at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday ran the 100-meter dash faster than Usain Bolt's 9.58-second world-record time. "[T]he Tiangong Ultra humanoid robot completed the 100-meter dash in 9.39 seconds during a preliminary heat," reports Engadget. "Developed by Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, the record-holding robot overtook Honor's Lightning robot, which completed the sprint in 9.47 seconds. From the report: Despite the impressive finish times, don't expect these humanoid robots to be used for any commercial purposes yet. After their sprints, they slammed directly into pads and some even required human assistance to be stretchered off the course. However, it's still a major improvement from last year's inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, where the Tiangong Ultra won the 100-meter dash in 21.5 seconds. Beijing has also hosted a humanoid robot half-marathon, where Honor's Lightning won in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, which also beat the pace of another human world record.

"The World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing kicked off August 22 and will run until the 26, hosting thousands of robot participants competing in more than just track and field events, including soccer, table tennis and boxing," adds Engadget.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Humanoid Robots Run 100 Meters Faster Than Usain Bolt's Record Pace More

Humanoid Robots Run 100 Meters Faster Than Usain Bolt's Record Pace

Comments Filter:

  • But what about his brother, Insane Bolt [adsspot.me]?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Not sure if you deserved funny, but the story did get me to check the speed profile. According to the AI, Usain Bolt peaks around 60 meters in and sustains that peak for only about 20 meters. But I suspect these sprint-bots may be accelerating all the way to the wall.

      Slapstick is funny because we're learning from it without personally experiencing the pain. Stuff like "Don't run into a wall at full speed." Whereas the lesson of these sprint-bots appears to be "We don't care about any fuggin' walls."

  • That's unpossible! Even so, nothing will ever break the speed limit of the universe, 100 MPH.
    • Imagine if they made a machine built to go fast over a smooth surface, I'm thinking of a new technology comprised of cylinders with traction I'm calling a wheel.

      • Just how do you propose the issue of it spinning round? Anybody inside would, at best, get dizzy, at worst squashed by centripedal forces.

        • That's the point of the computer driver. The same can be said about airplanes. The plane itself can take higher g-force levels where as a human would pass out. Drones for the future of air combat by far make the most sense. You could even use drones as wingmen for a human pilot. They probably already do that.

          This was a pretty impressive display of robotics. I can't wait to see what they can do next year and the year after that. The future is both amazing and scary at the same time.

        • Not to mention millipedal force.
  • I would pay to watch robots in actual battles, with axes or bows or guns.

    And one day, they could recreate historic battles accurately, to reveal why the outcome was what it was, and how it could have been different.

    Make it happen !

  • splat at the end (Score:4, Interesting)

    by v1 ( 525388 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @12:14PM (#66304666) Homepage Journal

    Funny how they've got that blue barrier for them to crash into at the finish line, then they get carried away on stretchers. Should be an interesting story behind that.

    Did they completely tap their battery for the final sprint and can't even stand anymore? Or were they never programmed on how to stop?

    • For some of the contestants (and observers) it seems to be a practical safety feature [youtube.com]

    • They can only run that fast going straight down.

    • Funny how they've got that blue barrier for them to crash into at the finish line, then they get carried away on stretchers. Should be an interesting story behind that.

      Did they completely tap their battery for the final sprint and can't even stand anymore? Or were they never programmed on how to stop?

      Roller skating.
      Ice Skating.
      Downhill skiing.
      Bobsledding.

      All things which are pretty easy for a human to start doing but very very difficult to STOP doing. At least not safely and voluntarily.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Since one of the safety features would be to stop moving when you are horizontal, running into a barrier and falling over seems like an easy way to complete the race rather than trying to code multiple stop conditions that need to be tested.

    • You would need to read into the rules of the competition. I bet the goal was stated as "run 100m as fast as possible" but nothing about stopping. Engineers optimised against the competition rules at the cost of everything else, including graceful stopping. Given the organizers put a blue soft wall after the finish line, they were expecting this kind of optimisation from competing engineering teams.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      There's nothing particularly interesting or surprising about it. The barrier is there to protect the robots from damage, and to protect the spectators and the stadium from damage. These are experimental machines and weigh enough that they could cause damage or injure someone.

      The stretchers are for the same reason, basically. The robots have to be autonomous, with the only remote control being a kill switch to make them inert, for safety reasons. To prevent the teams having to go onto the track to recover th

  • Tech companies are picking up their phones... (Score:3)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @12:23PM (#66304682)
    "Mister President, what are you going to do about The Robot Gap ?!"
  • The list of things that can run a 100 meters faster than a human is huge. I suppose it is an achievement, but it is a very minor one.

  • 24 mph is almost as fast as someone moderately out of shape on a bicycle.

    • 24 mph is almost as fast as someone moderately out of shape on a bicycle.

      On an e-bike or going downhill, maybe. A person has to be in relatively good physical condition and an experienced cyclist to maintain 24 mph along level ground.

      • You're right. My numbers are a bit off. For someone average and not great shape they could perhaps sustain 100 W, and would have a speed of around 15 mph on a 100 m run. If someone was a decent athlete, perhaps an amateur that races some times, they might be able to sustain 350 W, which gets them up to 25 mph on 100 m run.

        I usually cruise around 20 mph (more like 40 mph down the hills, where I am keeping up with country road traffic). Just big heavy bike, no toe clips, no e-bike, etc. I'm not in particularl

    • Incorrect comparison. You'd need to compare to a robot also on wheels. But if we're mismatching transport modes, we could compare the out of shape cyclist to the fastest self-guided drone.

      • Paper airplanes have almost hit the 100 meter mark for flight (98.43 meters by Liu Liwen). I'm not sure how fast such a paper airplane flies, but that's also an impressive bit of trivia.

  • Next come data-driven robot soldiers like in Star Wars

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSk3WawBZ5c

    It is not that far-fetched now.

    • Nope, though it was amusing watching the boxing robots. The one round house kicked the other but instead of the one being kicked going down, the kicker just fell and couldn't get up. The other one that took the hit just stood there.

  • Each year as tech advances new contestants will be faster than the previous years. Human evolution is simply not that fast (pun intended?).

  • I would have figured this would have happened a long time ago, shocked it took until now to have a machine beat a human at running bipedal.

    We aren't even the fastest bipedal animal.

    • We aren't even the fastest bipedal animal.

      Correct. That distinction belongs to the ostrich, with a top land-speed of 45 mph (72 km/h.)

  • Extrapolating (Score:3)

    by tinkerton ( 199273 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @12:58PM (#66304744)

    Pretty sure they will be able to do it in 6s soon, about what the fastest mammals can do.

    At 4.5 seconds you're accelerating at 1G on average, and you're running so there would be an air phase. So the design will have to start paying special care to grip.

    • I can sort of see how working on getting bipedal robots moving faster than humans - and doing it well - might provide useful information to robotic companies, given the sort of roles they're developing these robots for.

      But I'm not sure what the practical advantages would be in pushing them to cheetah speeds, for instance. At that point, why bother with bipedal versions? There are better, more stable means of locomotion.

      • It's an engineering challenge but not that practical because purposeful design won at the speed task with the invention of the wheel. Most every narrow use case has a better solution than humans many broader ones as well. Even reasoning in a narrow scope is now likely best done by an AI (or will be) if it is repetitive enough to have the overwhelming amount of training data (something humans do way better at, finding a good heuristic from minimal data and applying unrelated data well.)

        Fast is also an easie

        • Hence some designs incorporating legs and wheels like an autobot.

          • I've been wanting somebody to do a roller blade robot. That improves on the humanoid... lock the wheels as needed and it's better than feet.

            As far as doing most tasks, copying humans is not optimal, it's just so you can replace things designed around humans. If you design around a robot, a ton more things become possible much quicker and can do better than humans ever could.
            SPACE: robots won generations ago, we can't hope to complete. They didn't design for humans then try to make an android; we've have nev

      • I suppose they want some combination of acquiring a broad skillset and showing it off. Just these robot games already have dozens of competitions going on.
        And do they want robots that can run fast? I think so . As a kid I already imagined all terrain walking machines that could move real fast.

  • Um, runners have been stretchered off too. Some of them after marathons and such can't even stand and people have to hold their legs to stop the spasms.

    So this tracks.

  • Looks like the event's website is getting slashdotted because I can't load anything... :/

    https://www.whrgoc.com/ [whrgoc.com]

  • Can it fold laundry? (Score:4, Funny)

    by juancn ( 596002 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @01:14PM (#66304788) Homepage

    I mean, running faster is not that impressive, cars, bikes, motorcycles all go faster than a human.

    If the robot had taken a load of laundry out of the dryer and folded it, that would be impressive. Running? Meh

  • So? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by groobly ( 6155920 )

    So? My '67 Chevy was faster than Usain Bolt, too, or for that matter, the Chevy Bolt.

  • Walking on two legs is not a smart mode of locomotion for a machine.

  • They don't corner real well. (Score:3)

    by Revek ( 133289 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @01:48PM (#66304866)
    I like how they all crashed at the end.

  • Check Out The Videos (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @02:15PM (#66304918)

    I encourage you to take a short trip down the rabbit hole and look at some of the videos from this event.

    The capabilities of these robots is amazing.

    Their spectacular failures are gut bustingly hilarious.

    The speed and capability of these machines is quite unsettling as they run, jump, dance, fight...

    The number of these machines is shocking. Soooo many! They have a fucking army of humanoid robots.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by tokul ( 682258 )

      What useful tasks robot can perform by walking instead of driving? It is engineering effort wasted on useless function for machine.

      • What useful tasks robot can perform by walking instead of driving?

        All terrain vehicle. Stairs, boulders, hurdles, gaps, vertical leaps and climbs(ladder/wall), rappelling... A device with legs can do any/all of these. But a wheeled/tracked vehicle has to be specialized for each scenario, if it can do the particular obstacle at all.

        It is engineering effort wasted on useless function for machine.

        Even if the production machine is not legged (it doesn't have to be bipedal, it could be a quadraped, or even a centipede) the engineering lessons in motor control, dexterity, speed, balance... will all be useful in some way, even for completely

  • It's funny to think that not long ago just getting a bipedal robot to even walk was difficult. WABOT-1 took it's first steps in 1973 and looked like it was made from and Erector set and needed wires to connect it to it's power and control systems. It walked about as well as an old windup kids toy on a flat surface.

    The Honda P2 was the first self contained robot that could walk and was introduced in 1996. It walked about as well as a 1950's sci-fi movie showing walking robots.

    Honda ASIMO in 2000 was a bit m

  • A torso, head, a couple of arms and bipedal locomotion--is that it?
    What are the parameters?

  • How much energy to do that? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by thogard ( 43403 ) on Monday August 24, 2026 @09:38PM (#66305552) Homepage

    A human runs about 100 watts to a few hundred watts with extreme athletes hitting peaks of 2,000 watts.

    How fast can these machines run if limited to the same power?

Slashdot Top Deals

Badges? We don't need no stinking badges.

Close