Humanoids beat Usain Bolt’s 100m record

PLUS: Waymo builds a robotaxi brain

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Jennifer Mossalgue, Rowan Cheung, Shubham Sharma & Zach Mink
August 24, 2026

Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. At Beijing’s World Humanoid Robot Games, Tiangong Ultra tore through the 100 meters in 9.39 seconds — faster than Usain Bolt’s 9.58s world record. Honor’s Lightning came in second at 9.47s, also faster than the human world record.

Anything with a motor was always going to smoke us in a footrace. But these robots are improving fast: this year’s 100m times are 2.3× faster than last year’s winning pace.

In today’s robotics rundown:

  • Chinese humanoids outrun Usain Bolt

  • Waymo builds its own robotaxi brain

  • The FDA just cleared a blood-draw robot

  • MIT gives excavators a robotics upgrade

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

CHINESE ROBOTS

Image source: Tingshu Wang/Reuters

The Rundown: A Chinese humanoid ran 100 meters in 9.39 seconds at Beijing's World Humanoid Robot Games — faster than Usain Bolt's world record — then slammed into the deceleration mat and stumbled into the sidelines.

The details:

  • Tiangong Ultra clocked 9.39s, per state broadcaster CCTV, inside Bolt's 9.58s from Berlin 2009; Honor's Lightning took second at 9.47s.

  • The same model beat the human 400m record by nearly five seconds, running 38.15s against Wayde van Niekerk's 43.03s from Rio 2016.

  • Not everything cleared the bar. Runners failed to start or collapsed at the gun; a boxer folded over the ropes and stayed there until humans hauled it out.

  • This year’s Games have exploded to 2,056 robots from 666 teams across 16 countries, competing in 51 events ranging from 1,500m races to soccer.

Why it matters: The winning 100m time fell from 21.50s to 9.39s in a year, but the robots didn’t seem to have a braking mechanism. What may matter even more is that 21 of the 51 events test real-world scenarios — factories, hotels, emergency response — and more than 40% of all events now require full autonomy.

WAYMO

Image source: gibblesmash / Unsplash

The Rundown: Waymo is bringing more of its robotaxi technology stack in-house, building a custom 5nm AI chip for its newest driverless cars as California ridership climbs to roughly 1.4M paid trips a month.

The details:

  • Waymo’s new ASIC is in production in its latest robotaxi generation, Bloomberg reports, reducing its reliance on off-the-shelf chips from Nvidia and AMD.

  • It delivers 1,000+ TOPS dedicated to front-end sensor processing, with Waymo saying onboard compute has scaled 20x in eight years.

  • The ASIC debuts in Waymo’s sixth-gen Driver aboard the Ojai — a Zeekr-built minivan outfitted with Waymo’s autonomous hardware in Mesa, Arizona.

  • California regulatory data shows Waymo’s paid driverless trips have exploded from 143K in May 2024 to around 1.45M in May 2026 — a 10x jump in 2 years.

Why it matters: Waymo is scaling from an autonomy experiment into transportation infrastructure, with more than 220M fully autonomous miles behind it and rapid growth in San Francisco, LA, and beyond. Custom silicon could help make that expansion cheaper, faster, and far more reliable.

MEDICAL BOTS

Image source: Vitestro

The Rundown: The FDA just authorized the first robot that can autonomously find a vein, stick a needle in it, fill blood tubes, and bandage you up — turning one of medicine’s most routine human jobs into a robotics workflow.

The details:

  • Built by Dutch startup Vitestro, Aletta is cleared for adult outpatient blood draws; a trained phlebotomist can supervise up to three robots at once.

  • The machine combines near-infrared imaging, ultrasound, and Doppler to distinguish veins from arteries.

  • It then automatically applies a tourniquet, disinfects the skin, inserts the needle, swaps collection tubes, disposes of the needle, and applies a bandage.

  • In a 1,633-patient multicenter trial, Aletta achieved a 94.5% first-stick success rate when it identified a suitable vein.

Why it matters: Blood draws are routine but labor-intensive, and Aletta’s one-human-to-three-robots model could help clinics stretch scarce phlebotomy staff further. More broadly, its FDA authorization marks a step toward medical robots autonomously performing routine invasive procedures, rather than simply assisting clinicians.

MIT

Image source: MIT

The Rundown: MIT engineers built a new excavator controller that makes the machines behave more like giant robotic arms, letting first-time operators complete basic digging tasks 37% faster than with traditional joysticks.

The details:

  • The rig replaces the two joysticks with a mechanical arm-and-bucket controller that operators manipulate with their own arms, almost like an exoskeleton.

  • Volunteers trained one hour a day for a week across 15 simulated environments, including highways, riverbanks, mines, and urban sites.

  • With the new controller, novices performed nearly as well as experienced operators from the first week; joystick users improved much more slowly.

  • The team, working with Sumitomo Heavy Industries, is adding haptic feedback and envisions the controller being used to teleoperate excavators remotely.

Why it matters: Construction robots don't have to be fully autonomous to pay off. A more intuitive interface could let people operate heavy machinery remotely in hazardous job sites, offering a potentially faster path toward robotic construction equipment than solving full autonomy first.

QUICK HITS

China’s Tiangong humanoid made a showstopping entrance at Beijing’s World Humanoid Robot Games riding the Qiji X1, a rideable quadruped “robot horse.”

Generalist AI’s GEN-1.5 learns new manipulation tasks from one demo, succeeding 59% of the time without retraining and 83% after 5 minutes of task-specific data.

Researchers taught humanoids to mimic the tennis styles of Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic by learning their movements directly from broadcast footage.

China deployed 15 robot traffic cops in Hangzhou, issuing 170K+ warnings since May and cutting some violations by over 40%, Reuters reports.

Waymo reportedly more than doubled its federal lobbying spend to over $1M last quarter as it battles Uber over U.S. robotaxi rules.

XPeng’s humanoid-robotics business raised more than $900M at a post-money valuation above $6.3B, as it races to mass-produce its IRON humanoid by year-end.

Waymo handed over documents to NHTSA in its investigation of a January crash in Santa Monica in which a robotaxi struck and lightly injured a 9-year-old girl.

RoboStore, once the top North American distributor of China’s Unitree humanoids and robot dogs, is pivoting to build its own U.S.-made robots on Long Island, NY.

Nevada regulators cleared Tesla, Waymo, and Uber to deploy up to 8K robotaxis around Las Vegas over the next year.

Amazon’s Prime Air drones repeatedly dropped packages into pools and ponds, as the company preps to expand drone delivery to 500 U.S. cities.

That's it for today!

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Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — The Rundown’s editorial team