Tiangong Ultra runs 100 metres in 8.64 seconds as Beijing's robot games close

Tiangong Ultra won the large-size 100-metre final at the second World Humanoid Robot Games in 8.64 seconds on 26 August. Usain Bolt's human world record, set in Berlin in 2009, is 9.58 seconds. The robot, built by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Centre, had run 9.39 seconds and then 8.86 seconds earlier in the same meet.

A year ago, at the first games, the same line's best 100-metre time was 21.50 seconds. The drop to under nine seconds is the figure engineers will quote. It is also the clip that spread: several sprinters hit the padded wall after the line, shedding parts on camera.

How the rest of the card moved

Organisers closed the five-day meet on Wednesday at the National Speed Skating Oval. They listed 2,056 humanoid robots, 666 teams from 16 countries, 51 events and 1,301 contests. Last year the field was 280 teams and just over 500 robots across 26 events.

Record sheets from the two editions show the same pattern as the 100 metres. The large-size 400 metres fell from 1:28.03 to 38.15 seconds, inside the human world record of 43.03. The 1,500 metres fell from 6:34.40 to 2:21.64. Standing high jump rose from 0.96 metres to 3.40 metres. Standing long jump rose from 1.25 metres to 4.83 metres.

Those marks are not like-for-like with human athletics. Robot classes differ by size. Some jumps use different take-off rules. The useful comparison is year-on-year inside the same meet.

Who topped the table

AGIBOT finished first with 46 medals: 18 gold, 16 silver, 12 bronze. TianGong Robotics, linked to the Beijing Humanoid Centre and UBTECH, took 45 medals: 15 gold, 12 silver, 18 bronze. Unitree was a distant third on 10.

The split of events explains the near-tie. TianGong and UBTECH took the raw speed and jump card. AGIBOT piled up medals in dexterous-hand work, tool use and scenario tasks. Its OmniHand reached the final in all eight fine-motor events and won seven of them.

Soccer went elsewhere. B-Human, the University of Bremen and DFKI team, won the humanoid soccer title. It beat Leipzig's HTWK Robots 13-3 in the World Humanoid Robot Games knockout final after a 9-0 win over the same side in the RoboCup Asia-Pacific Beijing Masters. Earlier knockout scores against Chinese sides ran 21-1, 21-1 and 24-0.

What the games were for

Most of the 666 teams were Chinese. Mercator Institute figures circulating this week put China's 2025 humanoid output at about 12,800 machines, roughly 90 percent of the world total. The meet ran a week after the World Robot Conference in the same city. Xi Jinping is due in Washington for a summit with Donald Trump. The timing is not an accident.

Organisers also announced a free dataset covering 12 application scenes, more than 100 skills and over 10,000 tasks, and said the third games will return to Beijing in August 2027 with more workplace-style events.

The public tape cut both ways. Robots ran faster than Bolt and then walked into walls. Cheerleader units flailed. Pelvis housings failed on camera. That mix is useful. It shows how far locomotion controllers have come in twelve months, and how far they still sit from a machine that can cross a factory floor without a handler and a crash mat.

The 8.64-second time will be the headline. The medal table split between sprint specialists and hand specialists is the industrial clue. Firms that can do both in one body will write the next card.