Tiangong Ultra

Tiangong Ultra is the running-tuned member of the Tiangong family built by the Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics (X-Humanoid). On 19 April 2025 it won the world's first half marathon for humanoid robots, held alongside the Beijing Yizhuang half marathon in Nanhaizi Park: 20 robot teams and 12,000 human runners started together, and Tiangong Ultra covered the full 21.0975 km in 2 hours 40 minutes 42 seconds. That is a distance record for legged machines by a wide margin. The centre's own benchmark for comparison was Cassie, the ostrich-like biped with no upper body, which in 2021 ran 5 km in about 53 minutes. Tiangong Ultra averaged 7–8 km/h over the course; its top speed had been raised from the 6 km/h of the first Tiangong to a peak of 12 km/h. The robot is bigger than the original: about 180 cm and about 55 kg. Scaling a humanoid up is not free — the centre points out that a higher centre of mass forces more joint torque, higher impact loads and harder dynamic balance. What made the distance possible was mostly thermal and structural work: joint heat conduction and whole-machine thermal simulation to keep the actuators at equilibrium over nearly three hours, plus a rigid-flexible leg design with buffering structures so repeated foot strikes did not fatigue the frame. Battery hot-swapping kept it powered on the move. It also ran without a pilot. Instead of the gamepad control common in robot demonstrations, Tiangong Ultra used ultra-wideband wireless following: it tracked a lead unit, computed its own position from onboard multimodal sensors and adjusted heading and speed in real time. Motion control came from the family's predictive reinforcement imitation learning based on state memory, trained with added disturbances — turns, slopes, rough surfaces — and the whole machine ran on the centre's Huisi Kaiwu embodied-intelligence platform. Tiangong Ultra was never a catalogue product; it is a demonstrator, and the centre showed Tiangong 2.0 in the post-race exhibition area the same day. At the second World Humanoid Robot Games, held in Beijing's National Speed Skating Oval from 22 August 2026, Tiangong Ultra beat two human world records in two days. On the opening night it won its 100 m heat in 9.39 s — faster than Usain Bolt's 9.58 s — and improved to 9.34 s and then 9.32 s in the heats that followed, the last after a flawed start; 9.32 s is the winning result. A year earlier the same event was won by the same machine in 21.50 s. In a standing high jump demonstration it cleared 2.8843 m, against 96.6 cm for the 2025 champion. On 23 August it took the 400 m large-class final in 38.15 s against a human world record of 43.03 s; stablemate Tiangong Omni won the small class in 45.66 s. Guo Yijie, who leads Tiangong Ultra development, attributes the year-on-year jump mainly to the joints: torque and rotational speed both rose substantially, motor power increased and the electrical components became more reliable. Control was retuned per event on the Huisi Kaiwu platform — the 100 m rewards acceleration, the longer races reward cornering. Han Gang, the centre's motion-control algorithm specialist, adds the quieter reason: in 2025 the robots ran by visually following the painted lane markings, while in 2026 Ultra and the Omni series localise and map instead, holding a lane at speed without seeing the line. He puts the joint torque ceiling high enough to drive a small electric car. The 2026 machine is quoted at 180 cm and 52 kg. The 1500 m gold looked contested in the first reports and is not. The centre's bulletin listed it among Tiangong Ultra's golds of 23 August; Beijing Daily credited "the Tianzhuo team". Chinese trade coverage of the final resolves the two: Tiangong Ultra ran for Team Tianzhuo and won in 2:21.64, against a human record of 3:26.00. Feileishen took second at 2:30.00 and Fenghuo Shandian third at 2:30.22 — the whole podium finished under the human record.

▸News

A robot ran 100 m in 8.64 s, then hit the wall — the record is in the legs, the gap is in the brakes

8/31/2026 · Associated Press (via OPB)

Last year's champion cut its own entry list — and the times Unitree won with in 2025 were beaten by 50 seconds and four minutes

8/26/2026 · The Paper / Beijing Daily

Robots now outrun humans — but they still jump a metre short

8/24/2026 · Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics (X-Humanoid)

The first gold of the robot games was won in the joints, not in the brain

8/24/2026 · Beijing News (Bei Ke Caijing) — wywiad z Guo Yijie i relacja z finałów 400 m; IT之家

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