Robot beats Usain Bolt’s 100m record at Beijing games

Chinese humanoids have run and jumped beyond some of athletics’ most famous human benchmarks as more than 2,000 machines compete in Beijing

A humanoid robot has run 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt’s world record as Chinese machines smashed a series of human sporting benchmarks at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing.

Tiangong Ultra, developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, completed a preliminary 100m race in 9.39 seconds – beating the 9.58 seconds Bolt ran at the 2009 World Championships. Rival Lightning also finished inside the human record in 9.47 seconds, having clocked 9.32 during testing before the Games.

Tiangong also recorded a 2.88-metre standing jump, higher than Javier Sotomayor’s 2.45m human high-jump world record, although the two events are not directly comparable. It later completed 400 metres in 39.70 seconds, compared with Wayde van Niekerk’s human record of 43.03.

The performances come just a year after Tiangong Ultra took 21.50 seconds to win the 100m at the inaugural Games, highlighting the rapid improvement in humanoid speed and movement.

The opening ceremony at Beijing’s National Speed Skating Oval also featured 50 Tiangong 3.0 robots performing together in formation, while one of the machines acted as the event’s sole robot flag bearer.

More than 2,000 robots from 666 teams across 16 countries are taking part in 51 events, ranging from running and football to industrial and service tasks designed to test whether increasingly agile machines can eventually perform useful jobs outside the laboratory.

READ MORE: Robots that work, play and even tackle the laundry go on show in Beijing. More than 300 companies are showing machines that sort parcels, assemble car parts, help around the home and fight each other as the World Robot Conference puts the latest humanoid technology to the test.

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_{Main image: Tiangong Ultra races at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, where the machine completed 100 metres in 9.39 seconds – faster than Usain Bolt’s human world record. Credit: Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center}