A Chinese Robot Beat Usain Bolt’s 100-Meter Record. Should We Be Impressed?

In 2009, Usain Bolt set the men’s 100-meter dash world record of 9.58 seconds at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin. On Saturday, a humanoid robot developed by the Chinese company X-Humanoid beat that record by 0.19 seconds, according to Chinese state media. The robot ended its sprint by slamming full speed into a padded wall, falling down and being carried away by human blockistants.

High-profile feats of robotic athleticism have become increasingly common in China, where a humanoid robotics industry has flourished, aided by generous state support and billions in investment. Robots have danced and performed martial arts at the country’s top events.

At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing over the weekend, they boxed and participated in soccer matches. One played tennis against a human opponent, moving across the court and angling itself to return volleys. Earlier this year, a robot ran a marathon faster than any human in history.

But what do these robotic superhuman feats amount to?

“Most of the sports the humanoids are doing don’t directly translate into utility for many of the mundane tasks people are trying to get humanoids to perform, like being useful around the house,” said Michael Milford, a professor and director of the robotics center at Queensland University of Technology in Australia.

The robots are “capable in very specific and somewhat contrived events,” he said.

Chinese media has also acknowledged the gulf between athleticism and real-world applications in its coverage of the games.

“A factory robot does not need to win a sprint, nor does a service robot need a medal,” read a commentary in Xinhua, the state news agency. “But every gain in speed, stability and precision on the competition floor can bring robots one step closer to becoming genuinely useful beyond it.”

Even without significant and proven real-world applications, these high-profile displays and the attention they have attracted are already paying some dividends. Unitree Robotics — a humanoid robotics company whose videos of robots performing kung fu, kickboxing and back flips have attracted millions of views online, and whose robots featured heavily at the Humanoid Robot Games last year — debuted on the Shanghai stock market last week. Its shares ended their first day of trading up by more than 460 percent.

Progress and Imperfection

Alan Fern, a robotics professor at Oregon State University, was part of a research team that set the Guinness World Record for the fastest 100-meter run by a robot on two legs in 2022. That robot ran it in 24.73 seconds. To go from that, in four years, to X-Humanoid’s 9.39 seconds was an “enormous achievement,” he said.

But he noted that robotics companies have become relatively experienced in making robots that can run, jump and do acrobatics in controlled environments. He added that incremental improvements in these sports are mostly related to developing better hardware and refining the controls, rather than any significant technological breakthrough.

The robot at the games in Beijing that could play tennis against a human was more impressive, he said, because that involved interacting with something unpredictable.

Most robots struggle in situations where they need to adapt to changing situations. Yet the tennis robot had to track a fast-moving ball, decide where to move, coordinate its body and time the strike.

The robots are still far from perfect, with accidents abounding at the games. Robots fell down, sparked small fires and crashed into objects, according to videos of the event. The unusual running style of one machine, with its arms up near its face, earned it the nickname “shy robot” on the social media platform Weibo. Many of the racing robots did not seem capable of slowing down on their own and instead stopped by running into a padded barrier.

The vision of humanoid robots eventually being able to do anything a human can do is still far away, Mr. Fern said.

“Outside entertainment and a limited number of tightly constrained industrial settings, these robots do not yet have the general-purpose intelligence and reliability needed to operate in messy real-world environments,” he said.

Mr. Milford said that it could take many years before robots can safely and reliably perform in everyday settings.

He drew a comparison to self-driving cars: Three or four decades ago, a self-driving car could drive across a continent on highways. But only in recent years has the technology become advanced and safe enough for such cars to be deployed widely and largely without incident.

Car racing may be another good ***ogy, Mr. Fern said. “We still marvel at the engineering achievements in Formula 1, and some of those advances eventually transfer elsewhere, but we do not interpret every faster lap as a revolution in transportation,” he said.

“Similarly, beating Usain Bolt does not mean that the robot has surpblocked humans at locomotion in any general sense,” he added.

Mr. Bolt did not respond to a request for comment.

Siyi Zhaocontributed research.