Usain Bolt, meeting Lightning bolt.
A robot named Lightning just ran at the 100 meter dash in 9.32 seconds, shattering human sprinter Usain Bolt’s record.
The superhumanoid feat went down during a test run at the second World Humanoid Robot Games, which kicked off Saturday in Beijing, China, the Guardian reported.
Developed by Chinese smartphone manufacturer Honor, Lightning bolted down the track at a blistering 14.5 meters per second (around 32mph), as seen in a viral clip.
In doing so, the hot-to-trot bot eclipsed the previous World Record of 9.58 seconds set by the Bolt in during his record-breaking 100-meter sprint in Berlin, Germany 2009.
During that run, the Jamaican sprinting sensation achieved a top speed of over 27mph — the fastest ever clocked by a biped until now.
Coincidentally, this wasn’t the first time this cybernetic speed demon won the battle of man versus machine on the track.
In April, Lightning took just 50 minutes and 26 seconds to complete a half-marathon in Beijing, smashing the human high water mark of 57 minutes set in March by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo.
In other words, it seems that Lightning can strike in the same spot twice.
At the time, the synthetic sprinter stood around 5ft5 inches tall with 3-foot legs, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
Researchers lengthened lightning’s stems by around for inches ahead of this year’s World Humanoid Robot Games, which could account for the machine’s impressive showing.
If it shatters other human milestones, Lightning could be well on its way to wiping out the human “race” so to speak.
Either way human records are likely to fall during the rest of the robo-lympiad, during which 2,056 machine automated athletes from 666 teams across 16 countries will descend on the Chinese capital to go head-to-head in a multitude of events.
Along with traditional Olympic sports like track-and-field and archery, robots compete to see who’s the best at completing real-world tasks like tightening screws and picking up bottles.
