The Robot Olympics: Autonomous humanoids shatter Usain Bolt’s record in Beijing

The second edition of the ‘Robot Olympics’ or the World Humanoid Robot Games took place from August 22 to August 26 in Beijing. It showed how rapidly the field is progressing. From 26 events with around 500 robots in 2025, this year there were 51 events and more than 2,000 robots.

But the progress was not just in numbers. Compared with most robots being controlled by remotes last time, there was a huge rise in autonomous robots this year. In fact, one robot changed its running stance in the 400 metres to put its hands in front of its face instead of the normal human action of moving the hands to the side that it had been trained on. It did it without any human prompting and won the race.

The competition also saw more than track and field events. Robots competed in how dextrous they were in doing every­day tasks like opening bottle caps or using power tools. One of the highlights of the event was the breaking of the 100-metre world record of Usain Bolt. Last year’s event had the fastest robot running at half of Bolt’s speed. This time two surpassed him.