Two humanoid robots ran faster than Usain Bolt's world-record 100-meter sprint this week at the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, part of a five-day competition in which more than 2,000 machines from 16 countries are competing in events ranging from track and field to football and tug-of-war.
A China-built robot clocked 9.39 seconds in the 100 meters, edging past Bolt's 9.58-second mark set in 2009. In the 400 meters, one robot finished in 39.7 seconds — faster than the 43.03-second human world record set by South African sprinter Wayde van Niekerk in 2016 — while another robot cleared 2.88 meters in the standing high jump, more than a meter beyond the roughly 1.90-meter human record.
The games, running through Wednesday at Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval, span 51 events, according to state broadcaster CGTN: 30 conventional sporting contests and 21 scenario-based challenges that test robots on tasks such as warehouse sorting, restaurant service and emergency-response drills, with more than 40 percent of events requiring the machines to operate fully autonomously.
Beyond the Scoreboard
Organizers and industry figures have been careful to note that the record-breaking sprint and jump times, while eye-catching, are not necessarily the point of the competition. "Simply running and jumping does not improve efficiency," one robotics executive said, according to the Taipei Times, arguing that the scenario-based events built around warehouse and factory tasks are a better test of whether the machines can be made commercially useful.
This year's field of 666 teams is more than double the roughly 280 that competed at the inaugural Games last year, when the winning 100-meter time was still slower than 20 seconds. The rapid year-on-year improvement underscores how quickly humanoid robot locomotion has advanced, even as executives caution that turning athletic feats into reliable factory or household labor remains a separate and much harder engineering problem.
The event, co-hosted by the Beijing municipal government and China Media Group, also folded in two traditional Chinese sports for the first time this year: taijiquan, a martial art, and pitch-pot, a precision game with roots in ancient archery rituals.
