Tiangong Ultra, built by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, ran 100 metres in 8.86 seconds in a semifinal of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Tuesday, Al Jazeera reports.
Its previous best was 9.39 seconds, set at the opening of the same games on Saturday. Honor's Lightning robot ran 9.47 on the opening day, and Honor has recorded 9.32 in a test.
The comparison everyone reaches for, and its limits
The time is more than seven tenths of a second faster than Usain Bolt's 9.58, the men's world record set in 2009. We wrote about the earlier robot mark last month and the qualification then applies now.
A machine is not competing against Bolt in any meaningful sense. It has no fixed body plan, no rule limiting its power source or its number of joints, no requirement to have grown the legs it runs on. World records in athletics exist to compare humans doing the same thing under the same constraints, and none of those constraints apply here.
What the number does measure is engineering progress, and on that reading it is remarkable. Taking 0.53 seconds off your own time in three days is not incremental. It suggests the limits currently being hit are in control software and tuning rather than in hardware.
Four records, and the same caveat four times
The centre says Tiangong has now beaten four human world marks: the 100m, the 400m in 38.15 seconds, the 1,500m in 2:21.64, and the high jump at 2.88 metres.
Those are claims by the manufacturer about its own machine, at an event it is competing in, and we have no independent verification of the timing or measurement.
The 1,500m figure is the interesting one technically. Sprinting is a burst; 1,500 metres is a sustained effort that tests power supply, heat and mechanical wear, which are the things that usually stop robots.
The scale of the event
More than 2,000 robots from 666 teams are competing across 51 events, with backing from Baidu and Xiaomi's robotics division.
That is not a demonstration. It is an industry showing itself, and a state-adjacent research centre setting the pace within it.
What we could not establish
We could not establish Tiangong Ultra's height, weight or power source, how the times are measured, whether any independent body ratifies them, or whether the same machine set all four marks. We verified this account from a single publication, and the record claims are the manufacturer's.
