Beijing robot games reward autonomy, and Tiangong Ultra beat two human records

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At the opening of Beijing’s second World Humanoid Robot Games Saturday, a headless humanoid named Tiangong Ultra ran the 100 meter dash in 9.39 seconds.

It beats the human record held by Usain Bolt, giving China’s robot makers their biggest athletics headline yet.

Humanoid robots beat two human world records

State broadcaster CCTV measured the sprint at 9.39 seconds. This time is faster than the 9.58 seconds Bolt achieved in 2009. A press release by X-Humanoid listed the run time as a slightly faster 9.32 seconds.

The same model robot raced again on Sunday. It took 38.16 seconds to cross 400 meters, later adjusted to 38.15, taking almost five seconds off the previous record for the distance.

The Tiangong Ultra was developed by a government backed research center in Beijing.

The games were held at the Olympic speed skating arena in the capital. Dozens of humanoids and their operators squared off in athletics, boxing, football, and martial arts.

Cryptopolitan reported that smartphone maker Honor developed a robot that completed the course on its own in 50 minutes and 26 seconds.

A faster Honor unit called Lightning completed the course in 48 minutes and 19 seconds, but it was remote-controlled, so the event rules multiplied the time by 1.2.

Robots stalled and toppled between the record runs

In one 400-meter race, a robot with a white shell swung its arms and leaned forward so far that spectators wondered aloud if it would fall.

Several runners failed to start or moved at a walking pace. One boxing robot fell into the ropes and lay still until humans carried it off.

Hou Yali, a 72-year-old retiree in Beijing, wanted to see the machines face off against humans. “Right now, this is just running, just a competition of speed. It’s not a test of intelligence,” she said, adding she’d rather see robots do household chores.

Robotics, or embodied artificial intelligence, was among the priorities in China’s 15th Five-Year Plan covering 2026 to 2030.

Cryptopolitan reports the country already has over 2 million industrial robots operating. That’s about half of all the robots installed worldwide.

Unitree Robotics unveiled a humanoid it calls Superman, claiming a max speed of 12.66 meters per second and a standing jump of two meters. The company launched a Shanghai listing on August 19 with a valuation of around $9 billion.

Unitree has not released independent verification of those figures, which are from a company video. Most of the more than 5,500 humanoids Unitree sold last year went to research labs and entertainment buyers.

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