Chinese robotics maker Unitree unveiled an experimental humanoid robot it calls “Superman” in a video posted to social media on August 17, claiming performance that would surpass existing human records for speed and jumping.
According to Unitree, the machine completes a two-meter standing high jump and reaches a top running speed of 12.66 meters per second — about 45.6 km/h — on legs just 0.85 meters long. The company says those figures beat the human records for both the standing high jump and the 100-meter sprint, including Usain Bolt’s peak pace of roughly 12.4 m/s during his 2009 world-record run. Unitree said the robot took just over three months to build and described it as an experimental platform for highly dynamic movement rather than a commercial product — it has no hands or grippers.
Unverified claims
The figures come entirely from Unitree’s own demonstration video; no outside lab or independent body has measured or confirmed them. Coverage of the reveal noted the robot’s unusual, forward-leaning gait and pointed out that briefly hitting a peak speed differs from sustaining it over a full measured sprint. Unitree itself said the robot “still has significant room for improvement,” and the company has walked back a speed claim before, previously blaming measurement equipment for an earlier inflated figure.
Timing tied to a landmark IPO
The reveal landed a day before Unitree priced its Shanghai IPO at roughly $9 billion, becoming the first humanoid robotics company to list on China’s STAR Market after raising about $905 million. Unitree shipped roughly 5,900 humanoid and quadruped units in the first half of 2026, even as rival AgiBot overtook it as the world’s top humanoid robot vendor by volume — a competitive backdrop that gives the company reason to generate buzz around its humanoid robotics push.
Why it matters
Verified or not, the demo shows how fast humanoid hardware is advancing on raw athletic benchmarks, even as engineers caution that speed and jump records alone don’t translate into the reliability needed for factories, warehouses, or homes.