China's TianGong Ultra Robot Beat Bolt's 100m Record at 8.64s
A bipedal hunk of metal just made the fastest human in history look like he was jogging through wet cement. Now the real challenge begins: teaching a 75-kilogram sprinter to handle fragile factory boxes without flattening everything in sight.
Lead engineer Jack Guo and his team at X-Humanoid pushed TianGong Ultra across the 100-meter mark in a blistering 8.64 seconds during the Humanoid Robot Games. The metallic sprinter comfortably dismantled Usain Bolt's fabled 9.58-second world record by nearly an entire second, surviving round-the-clock torture tests and frantic component repairs between track heats.
Backed by industry heavyweights including Xiaomi, Baidu, and UBTech, the Beijing-based center is not designing sprinters just for social media clout. The concrete roadmap aims to transform rapid agility into industrial labor, having already deployed their sister platform Tianyi 2.0 to lift and shelf 12-kilogram engine components at a local Foton Cummins production facility.
Sprinting past 17 meters per second with a 75-kilogram chassis presented a terrifying physics problem: stopping without turning into kinetic scrap metal. To stay upright, the machine relies on three simulation-trained motion policies that continuously micro-adjust its joints without human pilot guidance, while the lab prepares a smaller sibling called Omni for 400-meter trials.
Centuries of biological evolution and elite athletic conditioning were just eclipsed by aluminum alloys running on simulation math. When sprinting past Olympic royalty turns out to be nothing more than a calibration drill for future factory workers, the boundary of what machines leave for human bodies shrinks dramatically.
Source: Reuters
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