Unitree’s New Superman Robot Claims to Outjump and Outrun Every Human, Usain Bolt Included

Unitree Robotics just posted a thirty-second clip of a bipedal machine labeled Superman rises from a still stance, clears a two-meter mark with both feet, lands, and accelerates into a sprint that the company measures at 12.66 meters per second. That figure converts to roughly 28.3 miles per hour, a peak that edges past the 12.42 meters per second recorded for Usain Bolt during the fastest segment of his 2009 world-record 100-meter run. The same machine stands 170 centimeters tall, weighs 45 kilograms, and carries legs only 0.85 meters long.

Unitree claims their game-changing humanoid robot came together in three months. The majority of the funding was allocated to the lower body, which has 20 degrees of freedom and handles all motion in the robot’s lower half. There are no fancy hands or grippers, but you can see a robust frame made of aluminum alloy and carbon fiber. The brains of the operation are in-house permanent magnet motors with some very sophisticated gearing, which allows the robot to jump so high and sprint like a bullet when necessary. The electronics include an NVIDIA computing stack, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, and Ethernet for good measure. On a full charge, it will run for around 90 minutes. When not pushed to the limit, the walking speed is approximately five kilometers per hour.

Unitree R1 Humanoid Robot (White, R1)

• Three models, one lightweight platform R1 Air (20 DOF, monocular camera), R1 (26 DOF, binocular camera, head+waist joints), and R1 Edu (26 DOF…
• Easy setup – no coding required for basic use Unbox, power on, and start. Manual teaching feature: physically pose the robot, and it replays the…
• More DOF = more expressive movement 26‑DOF models (R1 / R1 Edu) add head and waist articulation for smoother dance and running. For safety reasons…

The jump in the video is impressive, as there is no fancy run-up because the robot simply springs off the ground and clears a 2-meter-high board. That is the highest any human has ever gone in a standing high leap; the current record is 1.9 meters, set by Rune Almén in 1980. What height does the robot manage to reach? That is almost 2.4 times the length of its own legs in the air. It lands with astonishing control, and by the end, it is bouncing along without a single stumble.

The robot’s max speed is currently drawing a lot of attention. It claims to be moving 12.66 meters per second, but we won’t know for sure until they tell us how far it traveled, what the surface was like, and how they timed it. A single burst of speed is one thing; maintaining that pace for a hundred meters is quite another. If you look back at the company’s early robots, even the H1 could easily reach double digit speeds. What’s impressive is how quickly they’ve progressed in just a few months. Of course, it still appears a little unsteady, as the robot’s straight-back position gives the sense that it is only one wrong move away from toppling forward. That’s to be anticipated, given that the company has stated that motion control, stability, and energy efficiency remain areas for improvement.

Unitree is at a critical stage in its development. By the end of July, they had sold out of 18,000 bipedal robots across their whole line. They have machines that can dance, practice martial arts, and even win medals in robot competitions. Unitree recently went public on the Shanghai STAR Market, raising over 900 million dollars in what has been touted as a record-breaking IPO. They’ve got some big name backers, including significant Chinese technology companies, and everything came together just in time for the World Robot Conference and World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing.