Twelve seconds in twelve months

At the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday, a machine called Tiangong Ultra ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds in a preliminary heat, quicker than the 9.58 seconds Usain Bolt recorded in Berlin in 2009. Honor’s robot Lightning finished the same heat in 9.47 seconds, having already claimed 9.32 seconds in a pre-games test run at a peak of 14.5 metres per second. Unitree’s entry came last in 12.41 seconds.

The interesting figure is the one from last summer. In May 2022, Cassie, a legs-only bipedal platform from Oregon State University and Agility Robotics, set a Guinness-ratified 24.73 seconds over the distance, starting and finishing from a stand. At the first edition of these games last August, the winning time was 21.50 seconds. Roughly three seconds came off across three years. Twelve came off in the following twelve months.

The conditions bear little resemblance to the ones Bolt ran under. The robots stopped by running into a padded barrier and going down, and were carried off afterwards; elsewhere in the programme, machines tripped, broke apart and in at least one case caught fire. No independent body ratified the time, and the federation that sanctions the games was founded at the closing ceremony of last year’s games. The number measures an industry against its own previous attempt, rather than against a sprinter.

That is still the point. Beijing has designated humanoid robotics a strategic emerging industry, and the staging carries the argument: the Ice Ribbon oval built for the 2022 Winter Olympics, 2,056 robots from 666 teams across 16 countries, and the World Robot Conference running in the same city the same week with around 3,000 products on show. The intended audience is investors and Washington in roughly equal measure.

The most useful line came from the winning team. Guo Yijie, technical lead on Tiangong Ultra, told Xinhua that turning peak performance into consistent reliability is the real difficulty, and that sustained running exposes structural fatigue, joint cooling and drivetrain durability. Sixteen months ago the same robot won Beijing’s humanoid half-marathon in two hours, forty minutes and 42 seconds, swapping batteries three times along the way. A sprint time is cheap to buy with actuator power and a short duty cycle. Endurance, load-carrying and uneven ground are where legged machines start to matter for logistics, inspection and eventually dismounted military tasks, and those are the numbers worth watching as the games run through the week.

Sources: South China Morning Post, Al Jazeera, CBS News, NBC News, Euronews, Associated Press, Xinhua, Guinness World Records, Marathon Handbook.