A robot built by Beijing’s X-Humanoid ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games, beating Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second record. Roboticists point out that speed on a known course is far easier for a machine than folding laundry.
A machine has run the 100 metres faster than any person ever has. A robot built by the Beijing company X-Humanoid covered the distance in 9.39 seconds at the second World Humanoid Robot Games, against Usain Bolt’s 9.58 seconds from 2009.
It was not the only human record to fall. The same firm’s robot cleared 2.88 metres in the high jump, well beyond Javier Sotomayor’s 2.45, while a machine from the phone maker Honor was timed at 9.32 seconds in trials.
The event is enormous. More than 2,000 robots from 16 countries are competing across 51 events at Beijing’s Olympic speed skating oval.
The year-on-year jump is where the story starts. At the first games in 2025 Unitree’s H1 won the 400 metres in 88 seconds, against a human record of 43, and much of what the robots did was remote controlled, in a field now being reshaped by China’s smartphone supply chain.
