Humanoid robot breaks Bolt’s 100m record, but experts unimpressed
▼ Summary
– A robot from Beijing’s X-Humanoid ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games, surpassing Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second record.
– X-Humanoid’s robot also cleared 2.88 metres in the high jump, beating Javier Sotomayor’s 2.45, and Honor’s robot hit 9.32 seconds in trials.
– Over 2,000 robots from 16 countries competed across 51 events at Beijing’s Olympic speed skating oval, with the 2025 games showing major speed gains from prior events.
– Experts like Rodney Brooks and Yanran Ding argue the sprinting feats are publicity stunts, as tasks like folding laundry or navigating unknown environments are far harder than running a set course.
– European firms focus on practical robot training, such as NEURA Robotics’ gyms for messy environments and London’s Humanoid raising $152mn for scalable manufacturing, prioritizing real-world utility over spectacle.
A humanoid machine has now outrun the fastest human in history. At the second World Humanoid Robot Games, a robot developed by Beijing-based X-Humanoid finished the 100-metre dash in 9.39 seconds, eclipsing Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second mark from 2009.
The sprint was not the only record to tumble. The same company’s machine soared 2.88 metres in the high jump, surpassing Javier Sotomayor’s 2.45-metre standard, and a robot from the smartphone maker Honor clocked 9.32 seconds during trial runs.
The scale of the competition is striking. More than 2,000 machines from 16 countries are battling across 51 events at Beijing’s Olympic speed skating oval.
The real story lies in the leap from one year to the next. Back at the inaugural games in 2025, Unitree’s H1 took the 400 metres in 88 seconds, a far cry from the 43-second human record, and much of the action was directed by remote operators. That landscape is now shifting as China’s smartphone supply chain pours into the field.
Building a sprinter takes deliberate design. Honor extended its robot’s legs by 10 centimetres, bringing them to 1.05 metres ahead of the games, a tweak aimed squarely at shaving time off a single metric.
Experts who build robots for a living have been candid about what these feats actually prove. Rodney Brooks, the MIT emeritus professor and iRobot founder, dismissed an earlier Beijing robot race as a “publicity stunt” with “nothing useful that you could use in any application because it shows no safety at all.”
The autonomy numbers back him up. In that April half marathon, just 38% of entries ran on their own, with the rest steered remotely, and even the self-directed ones followed a pre-mapped course.
Yanran Ding of the University of Michigan pinpointed the misconception. People hold “a cognitive bias to think that running a half marathon faster than a human is more difficult than folding laundry, which is not true,” and Europe is wagering on exactly that gap.
Oregon State’s Alan Fern sees it the same way. He credits the progress to engineering muscle and funding rather than any conceptual leap, and he argues that genuine advancement means a robot navigating a space it has never encountered.
That is the challenge European firms have taken on. NEURA Robotics is building gyms to train machines in cluttered, unpredictable settings, while London’s Humanoid has raised $152mn with Bosch lined up to manufacture at scale.
None of that effort produces a photo as dramatic as a robot beating Bolt. But it is the only version of this work that ends with a machine doing something a person actually needs done.
(Source: The Next Web)
