Cassie's roughly 40 supporters were elated, cheering when it crossed the finish line. Its success was a seminal moment in robotic history, they said. Cassie's speed and agility, honed by artificial intelligence training, showed that bipedal robots could maneuver in taxing real-world situations while maintaining balance, a problem that has plagued designers in the past.

A two-legged robot that can chase you down in the street may sound like something dreamed up for the latest episode of Black Mirror. But it may not be far from reality, after a two-legged robot known as'Cassie' set a new Guinness World Record for the fastest 100 metres by a bipedal robot. Cassie clocked the historic time of 24.73 seconds, starting from a standing position and returning to that position after the sprint, with no falls. While that's more than 15 seconds slower than the world record for a 100-metre sprint by a human, held by Usain Bolt at 9.58 seconds, it is faster than most humans would take to jog the same distance. Oregon State robotics professor Jonathan Hurst, who led the development of the robot, described it as'a big watershed moment'.

He said that he grew up in a poor neighbourhood in east Los Angeles and could relate to youngsters today trying to make living.

We've seen running bipedal robots before, but they tend to move like, well, robots. Ryuma Niiyama of MIT's Robot Locomotion Group wants to build a bot that runs as much like a human as possible, right down to the black nylon running shorts. The robot, aptly named Athlete, sports an artificial musculoskeletal system that mirrors human muscles in the leg, hip, lower abdomen, and booty and has a springy elastic blade foot like those seen on prosthetic running legs. Niiyama's goal is a flexible, agile robot with less of a mechanical gait and more of a Usain Bolt-type stride. Athlete has seven sets of actuator-driven artificial muscles in each leg, plus touch sensors on each foot and an inertial measurement unit on the torso for detecting the body's orientation.

It was Usain Bolt's toughest test yet - and a battle of man versus technology. The world-record holding athlete took on a shoebox sized robot - and lost. The tiny Puma Beatbot, created by his sponsors to help its athletes train, was able to match and exceed bolt's 44km/hr top speed. The tiny Puma Beatbot, created by Usain Bolt's sponsors to help its athletes train, was able to match and exceed Bolt's 44km/hr top speed. 'Everyone runs faster when there's someone to beat, said Puma.

The robot works by scanning lines on the track with an array of nine IR sensors, while wheel rotations are monitored via Arduino to keep track of speed and distance. If you figured this would be expensive, you're right. Even though there isn't an exact price, for now, BeatBot will only be offered to Puma-sponsored teams and athletes. Until that changes, you'll just have to make due the old fashioned way: finding a faster running buddy.