Signals
Usain Bolt’s 100m record just fell to a robot
A Tiangong Ultra humanoid ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds in Beijing, against Usain Bolt's 9.58. It was a heat, not a final, on a prepared track, and the machine stops by running into a crash pad.
A Tiangong Ultra humanoid ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds at the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on 22 August. Usain Bolt’s 2009 world record for the men’s 100 metres is 9.58 seconds. The machine was built by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center.
The figure was set in a preliminary heat, not a final, on a track prepared for the event. The machines cannot stop themselves at the end of the run. They decelerate into a crash pad.
First reports disagreed with each other. Coverage circulated three different times over the same distance at the same games, and several outlets attributed the fastest of them to a different machine than the one that set it. Where the reporting conflicts we publish the figure our source states and name it, rather than averaging the numbers or picking the most striking one.
Two machines finished inside Bolt’s time. Tiangong Ultra’s 9.39 was the faster and the quickest recorded at the games; Honor’s Lightning ran 9.47 in an official heat. Lightning is the one of the two we hold a classified record for, and it is also the one that demonstrates the stopping problem rather than describing it: it struck the padded wall past the line, as it had struck a railing near the finish of a half-marathon in April.
Same distance
What the two times share, and what they do not
- The startblocks and a gun, against a standing start
- The surfacea championship track, against one prepared for this event
- The fieldseven rivals in a final, against a preliminary heat
- The finisha sprinter slows under their own control; the machine runs into a crash pad
What it establishes
That a bipedal machine can sustain a running gait and stay balanced at speed over a fixed distance, under competition conditions rather than in a demonstration staged by its maker. That is a real result and not a small one. Balance at speed has been the limiting problem in legged locomotion for as long as the field has existed.
What it does not establish
Comparability with human sprinting. A sprinter starts from blocks on a shared track, holds a lane against seven rivals, runs a final rather than a heat, and stops under their own control. None of those conditions applied here. The two figures are measured over the same distance and almost nothing else.
It says nothing either about what these machines do when they are not running in a straight line on a surface built for them. Running fast is not the hard part of getting a robot into a house.
The result was reported by 77 independent publishers, among them Reuters, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, CNN, Sky News and the Guardian. No governing body ratifies robot performance, so there is no ratification to cite: the timing is the games organiser’s.
