A humanoid robot ran 100 meters in 9.39 seconds, faster than Usain Bolt

A humanoid robot covered 100 meters in 9.39 seconds on August 22, faster than the fastest human has ever run it, and then stopped the only way it knows how, by hitting a wall of foam.

What happened

Tiangong Ultra, developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, won its preliminary heat at the opening of the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. Usain Bolt set the human world record of 9.58 seconds in Berlin in 2009. Honor’s Lightning finished second in the same heat at 9.47 seconds, also inside the record.

The year-over-year improvement is the more striking number. At the inaugural games in 2025, Tiangong Ultra ran the same distance in 21.50 seconds. That is roughly a 2.3x gain in twelve months, achieved largely through reinforcement learning in simulation rather than new hardware categories.

Footage from the event shows what happened after the finish line. The robots slammed into cushions and fell to the ground in order to stop, and several were carried off the track on stretchers.

What it means

Locomotion at speed on two legs was, until recently, treated as a hard control problem. It has now been substantially solved for the narrow case of running in a straight line on a flat prepared surface with a known finish point.

The things that did not get solved in the same twelve months are the ones that matter outside a stadium: deceleration, balance recovery under disturbance, and failing safely when something goes wrong. A machine that reaches a top speed comparable to an elite sprinter and has no braking strategy other than controlled collision is not yet a machine that can operate near people. The gap between the sprint time and the stopping method is a reasonable measure of how far commercial deployment still is.