Two new videos from Chinese companies make it clear: it'll soon be no use trying to run from robots. Rapid upgrades in speed and agility mean robot dogs can now sprint at near-Olympic pace, and humanoids are running smoothly over tough terrain.
Let's start with the humanoid – Unitree's G1 Bionic. We've written quite a bit about this diminutive android in the last year or two, largely because it's incredibly cheap, the base model starting at a remarkable US$16,000.
The G1 stands 132 cm (4 ft 4 inches) tall, weighs 35 kg (77 lb), perceives the world through LiDAR, depth cameras and microphone arrays, and has looked very athletic since launch. Its 23 degrees of joint freedom and torquey 90 Nm (66 lb-ft) knee motors allowing it to jump, dance, spin and contort itself into a suitcase-sized pretzel for carrying and storage.
In a new video released last week, the G1 Bionic stakes its claim for "the smoothest walking and humanoid running in the world." Indeed, there's a bit of swagger in the G1's hips now as it walks down a public street, leaving onlookers agape. But most impressive is the way it can now run up, and down, or sideways along steep inclines, while handling uneven surfaces with apparent ease. Check it out:
Certainly, this is a marketing video and we're not seeing any outtakes where this hollow-headed machine may have face-planted along the way, but the progress here is certainly impressive.
It's still only getting along at a jogging pace for the moment, though – the real speed is happening in the quadruped world, where a Hangzhou-based team is claiming its Black Panther V2.0 robot dog is now sprinting as fast as 10.4 meters per second. That's more than 23 mph (37 km/h), and with a 100-meter sprint time under 10 seconds, the Panther can now run with elite human athletes.
To get there, the researchers – a collaborative team between Zhejiang University and a startup called Mirror Me – had to replace the robot's legs, which kept snapping at the shins. So they built it a sprung lower-leg shock absorbing system, with grippy rubber feet, to allow them to crank the motor power up.
The 38-kg (84-lb) Black Panther 2.0 now takes up to five strides per second, and if the embedded video below is legit, it looks ridiculously quick.
It's still a long way from being the apex quadruped – cheetahs have been clocked running around three times faster at 104 km/h (65 mph). But the Black Panther achieves its top speed in what's essentially a power-walking motion, as opposed to the stretched-out galloping gait you'd typically see fast land animals using at speed. You can bet that's coming soon.
AI-powered robotics isn't advancing quite as quickly as language and reasoning AI models are, but this area is absolutely exploding with new companies looking to get intelligent robots out into the workforce in all sorts of capacities.
They're not a ton of use right now, but they're mastering the basics: grabbing various different item shapes, lifting, carrying and moving things, opening doors, beginning to use tools – and learning to navigate through spaces built for humans.
It's hard to watch the progress in this field accelerating and not be reminded of various Black Mirror episodes – but with birth rates continuing to decline in most wealthy countries, robotic labor might be the only way to keep economies growing in the coming decades. And the technology is clearly coming of age.
