Unitree posts sprint milestone

Humanoid robots run by balancing on two legs while motors push their joints like muscles, and Unitree said its H1 hit 10.1 meters per second in a track test released on April 12. (unitree.com) The number in Unitree’s video was a peak speed from a sensor on the track, not an official 100-meter race time, and the company said measurement error was possible. Heise, which reviewed the release on April 14, said Unitree did not disclose the robot’s total time over 100 meters. (heise.de) Unitree’s own product page lists the H1 at about 1.8 meters tall with a listed weight of about 47 kilograms for H1 and about 70 kilograms for H1-2, while recent coverage of the sprint test described the running machine at roughly 1.75 to 1.78 meters tall and about 62 kilograms. (unitree.com; interestingengineering.com) The benchmark people keep using is Usain Bolt’s 2009 men’s 100-meter world record of 9.58 seconds, which works out to an average speed of about 10.44 meters per second. Unitree’s reported 10.1 meters per second is close to that average, but it was a momentary top speed rather than a full-race average. (worldathletics.org; heise.de) Unitree has been pushing this machine’s speed for more than a year. In March 2024, Guinness World Records recognized the H1 Evolution V3.0 as the fastest full-size humanoid robot at 3.3 meters per second on a flat surface. (guinnessworldrecords.com; interestingengineering.com) That older Guinness mark was for a full-size humanoid category, not for all humanoid robots ever built. Guinness still lists Honda’s ASIMO at 9 kilometers per hour, or about 2.5 meters per second, as the fastest-running humanoid robot under an older record definition from 2011. (guinnessworldrecords.com) The sprint clip also lands days before Beijing E-Town’s 2026 Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon on April 19, where robots and human runners are scheduled to share the event day. Beijing’s official event page said the course starts at Kechuang 17th Street by Tongming Lake and finishes at Nanhaizi Park. (english.beijing.gov.cn) China has turned these public robot runs into a showcase for legged machines that can stay upright, recover from stumbles, and keep moving outdoors on pavement. People’s Daily reported in March that more than 20 teams joined the first test run for this year’s half-marathon. (en.people.cn) Unitree is also using H1 as a public-facing machine, not just a lab demo. The company said 16 H1 robots appeared in a dance performance during China Central Television’s Spring Festival Gala broadcast on February 28, 2025. (unitree.com) For now, the cleanest reading is narrower than the hype: Unitree published a video showing one of the fastest peak speeds yet claimed for a full-size humanoid, and the next public test comes on April 19 in Beijing. (heise.de; english.beijing.gov.cn)