Honor Lightning

Lightning is a running humanoid built by Honor, the Chinese smartphone maker spun out of Huawei in 2020. It became publicly known on 22 August 2026, when it finished second in the 100 m final of the second World Humanoid Robot Games at the National Speed Skating Oval in Beijing, clocking 9.47 s — faster than Usain Bolt's 9.58 s human world record from Berlin 2009, and beaten on the line by Tiangong Ultra at 9.39 s. In a preparatory run before the games the machine had covered the distance in 9.32 s, with a reported peak speed of 14.5 m/s. The interesting part is what the team changed to get there. Ahead of the competition the researchers lengthened the robot's legs by 10 cm, to 1.05 m — a straightforward mechanical answer to a mechanical problem, since stride length multiplies with step frequency to give running speed. That is the opposite of the software-first approach most humanoid makers advertise, and it is a reminder that a sprint record on a track says little about a machine's usefulness anywhere else. What makes the entry unusual is who built it. Honor is a consumer electronics company with no robotics product line, and Lightning is a competition machine rather than a product: as of this profile the company has published no specification sheet, no price, no availability and no stated application. Everything above comes from event coverage and statements quoted by news agencies, not from a manufacturer's data sheet, and the profile will be rewritten when Honor publishes one. The catalogue lists it because a working sprinting humanoid from a phone maker is a real data point about how far the industry's centre of gravity has shifted in China — not because the machine is on sale.

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