Chinese robot Tiangong clocks sub-9-second 100 metres in Beijing

China's Tiangong Ultra humanoid robot ran 100 metres in 8.86 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Tuesday, lowering the 9.39-second mark it set at the event's opening. The time was more than seven-tenths of a second faster than the 9.58-second men's human world record set by Jamaican sprinting great Usain Bolt in 2009. The robots' rapid improvement has been one of the main attractions at the second edition of the Beijing event, where more than 2,000 robots from 666 teams are competing in 51 events including football, dancing and industrial-task contests. Tiangong won the 100-metre (328-foot) race at last year's inaugural games with a much slower time of 21.50 seconds, months after clinching victory at the world's first humanoid robot half-marathon in Beijing last year with an amateur-level time of 2 hours 40 minutes. "Reading that a motor-powered robot can run faster than a human is one thing," said Li Hui, 26, an engineer with Fudan University's table-tennis team.