Chinese humanoid robots beat Bolt’s 100m record

At Beijing’s National Speed Skating Oval, a humanoid robot crossed the 100-meter finish line in 9.39 seconds during the opening of the World Humanoid Robot Games. It beat Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second human record — then robots slammed into a protective wall, a reminder that acceleration is only half of running.

The event’s numbers are growing fast. More than 2,000 humanoid robots from 16 countries are taking part in 51 events, from sprinting, high jump and weightlifting to football, table tennis, factory work and rescue scenarios. The games run from August 22 to 26, with more than 660 teams entered, most of them Chinese.

The 9.39-second result belongs to Beijing-based X-Humanoid, according to the Associated Press. Honor, the Chinese smartphone maker, said its robot ran 100 meters in 9.32 seconds during a trial before the opening; Japanese reporting separately identified a 9.32-second preliminary result from the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center’s Tiangong robot. Those are company or organizer-linked figures, not independent race results. Honor’s machine reached a reported peak speed of 14.5 meters per second, while X-Humanoid’s robot reached 2.88 meters in the standing high jump, above the human record of 2.45 meters.

The mechanism is becoming more tightly integrated. Pandaily reported that Honor’s robot used high-frequency sensors, edge computing — processing data close to the machine — and torque-switching motors to coordinate its movement and recover after hitting a padded wall. Across the sector, executives told the publication that ball-screw component prices had fallen roughly tenfold over three years and reducer prices had halved, helping bring down whole-machine costs as supply chains scale.

Concretely, the near-term change is a stronger test bed for robot mobility and manufacturing, not a humanoid workforce arriving tomorrow. Experts told AP that these robots are still mostly used for demonstrations, performances and research, and mass real-world deployment will take time. China is using the games and its parallel World Robot Conference — where companies displayed around 3,000 products — to push an industry that Beijing treats as a strategic growth area, while the United States has moved to restrict imports of new foreign-made humanoid robots on national-security grounds.