A humanoid robot out of China is turning one of sports’ most untouchable benchmarks into a tech talking point after its maker claimed the machine can move faster than Usain Bolt at full speed. The Unitree Superman robot was unveiled by Chinese robotics company Unitree with a claimed top speed of 12.66 meters per second, or about 28.3 mph, along with a standing jump of two meters. Unitree said the machine was developed in just over three months and remains a work in progress. The company is already one of the world’s largest makers of humanoid robots by sales.
Video
Unitree leaned heavily into the superhuman comparison when it introduced the prototype. In the company’s original social media post, it promoted “Superman” as “Breaking the limits of humanity” and said its standing jump and running speed surpassed “the records of all humans around the world.” Unitree added that the machine has “significant room for further improvement in the coming months.”That sounds like Bolt has officially been knocked from the top spot, but there is an important distinction. The Unitree Superman robot has not been shown defeating Bolt’s 100-meter world record under comparable race conditions. World Athletics records list Bolt’s 9.58-second performance in Berlin on August 16, 2009, as the men’s 100-meter world record. A World Athletics study of human sprinting reported that Bolt reached a maximum velocity of approximately 12.34 meters per second during that race.
Unitree’s claimed 12.66 meters per second is therefore faster than the estimated peak speed Bolt reached during his record run. What has not been publicly established is how quickly Superman accelerates from a standing start, whether it can maintain that speed across 100 meters, how repeatable the result is, or what time it could post over a complete race. Those differences matter because peak velocity and a timed 100-meter performance measure two different things.
The jump claim is similarly eye-catching. Unitree says the Unitree Superman robot can jump two meters, or roughly 6 feet 7 inches, from a standing position. Guinness World Records lists Christopher Spell as the holder of the highest standing jump by a man at 1.70 meters, or 5 feet 7 inches, achieved in Shrub Oak, New York, in February 2021. Unitree’s figure would clear that mark by a wide margin if independently verified under comparable rules.
Robot speed records also provide useful context for just how quickly the technology has progressed. Guinness World Records recognizes Cassie, the bipedal robot developed at Oregon State University and built by Agility Robotics, for completing 100 meters in 24.73 seconds in 2022. Cassie had to begin standing, finish standing, and complete the distance without falling. Guinness specifically notes that the test measures performance across an entire standard distance rather than a brief moment of maximum speed.
Unitree itself has already shown that its machines can handle more than short promotional demonstrations. In the company’s official recap of the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games, Unitree said its robots won four gold medals across the 1,500-meter race, 400-meter race, 100-meter obstacle event, and 4 by 100-meter relay. Unitree reported a best competition speed of 4.78 meters per second at those games, showing how dramatic the claimed jump to 12.66 meters per second would be for the new Unitree Superman robot.
Superman is also arriving during a much bigger race to build humanoid machines that can do more than dance, flip and sprint for cameras. Reuters reported from the 2026 World Robot Conference in Beijing that more than 300 exhibitors are showcasing machines ranging from Unitree’s R1 and Superman to UBTECH’s Walker C1, Leju Robotics’ KUAVO, Fourier Intelligence’s GR 3 and Robotera’s L7. While Superman is grabbing attention with raw athleticism, several competitors are focusing on manufacturing, logistics, public service and human interaction.
The timing has been especially valuable for Unitree. Reuters reported that the company’s shares closed 460 percent above their offering price during their August 19 debut on Shanghai’s STAR Market, valuing Unitree at roughly $50 billion. The company raised about $900 million through the offering, giving it considerably more capital as competition in humanoid robotics intensifies.
Even Unitree’s leadership is acknowledging that spectacular hardware does not mean robots are ready to take over everyday life. At the World Robot Conference, founder and CEO Wang Xingxing told Reuters that humanoid robots are still limited by the artificial intelligence systems needed to understand unfamiliar environments and make reliable decisions. Reuters also reported that the World Humanoid Robot Games, scheduled for August 22 through August 26 in Beijing, will include factory, retail, household and service tasks in addition to racing and other crowd-friendly events.
That gap between impressive demonstrations and safe real-world deployment has already attracted scrutiny. In earlier comments to the New York Post, University of Louisville computer scientist Dr. Roman Yampolskiy warned about the consequences when increasingly capable machines malfunction. “The event would be viewed not as comic relief but as a dangerous systems failure,” he said. “A glitch in a dancing robot is mostly embarrassing. A glitch in a security robot, delivery system, self-driving platform, medical assistant or industrial machine can injure people, damage property or trigger cascading failures.”
For now, the Unitree Superman robot represents an extraordinary company-reported leap in humanoid movement, not an official defeat of Usain Bolt. Unitree’s claimed peak speed edges above the velocity researchers measured during Bolt’s legendary Berlin sprint, but Superman still has to prove what it can do from the starting line to the finish line under a standardized, independently verified test. If a humanoid eventually clocks a complete 100 meters faster than 9.58 seconds, the conversation will move from robots approaching human athletic limits to a machine actually breaking one of the most famous records in sports.
