Beating Bolt Is Easy. Picking Up a Bean Is the Hard Part.
Humanoid robots in Beijing just ran faster than any human alive, but whether they can do factory work is still the question that matters for businesses.
- 9.39 s
- fastest 100m time by a humanoid robot
- 2.88 m
- standing high jump height (human record: 2.45 m)
- 2,000+
- robots competing from 16 countries
- 138%
- increase in competing teams from last year
This week in Beijing, humanoid robots competed at the second World Humanoid Robot Games — and one of them ran 100 metres in 9.39 seconds. Usain Bolt's world record, set in 2009, is 9.58 seconds. That same robot cleared a standing high jump of 2.88 metres, above the human high-jump world record of 2.45 metres. More than 2,000 robots from 16 countries competed across 51 events.
But here is what matters if you work with robots. The same platforms that sprint faster than the fastest human alive couldn't reliably pick up beans with tweezers or open a lid. The games included eight dexterity events — connecting cables, unpacking boxes, assembling power tools — and those results were far less impressive than the sprint times.
The scoring rules make the gap plain. Robots that finished tasks fully on their own scored full points. Robots that needed a human to remotely control them scored only half. That tells you where the technology actually sits: fast legs, unsteady hands.
The pace of improvement is what should get your attention. Last year's best 100-metre time was 21.5 seconds. This year it fell to 9.39 — from 21 seconds to 9 in a single year. If dexterity closes even a fraction of that gap over the next twelve months, the case for humanoid robots in physical work changes fast. Watch the dexterity scores next year — not the sprint times.