Usain Bolt’s 100m record broken at World Humanoid Robot Games

JUST IN: A Chinese humanoid robot named 'Lightning', developed by Honor, has broken Usain Bolt's 100m record, running the distance in 9.32 seconds at a World Humanoid Robot Games test event in Beijing, state media reports.

Usain Bolt's hundred metre record just fell, to a robot. A Chinese humanoid called Lightning ran the hundred in 9.32 seconds at a test event for the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. Bolt's mark, the 9.58 he set in Berlin back in 2009, has stood untouched by any human since.

Lightning was built by Honor, the smartphone maker, and hit a peak speed of fourteen and a half metres per second. And this machine has form. In April it won the Beijing half marathon in fifty minutes and change, quicker than the elite human record pace. Then the engineers stretched its legs by ten centimetres before this event. Bolt never had that option.

Beijing is treating humanoid robots as a strategic industry, factories, logistics, your living room next. The sprint is the advert.

The fastest thing on two legs is no longer a person. It charges off a wall socket.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.