Meet Bolt: The Fastest Humanoid Robot Ever Built
Chinese startup MirrorMe Technology has unveiled a 175cm humanoid robot with a peak speed of 10 metres per second — within touching distance of Usain Bolt's all-time sprint record.
By Riley Cross · February 18, 2026 · 5 min read · robot-athletes
It's named after the greatest sprinter in human history, and its creators want you to know they mean it. In February 2026, Chinese startup MirrorMe Technology unveiled Bolt — a full-size humanoid robot standing 175 centimetres tall and weighing 75 kilograms — and claimed it as the fastest running humanoid robot ever built, with a peak speed of 10 metres per second in real-world testing.
Context: How Close Is That?
To put that in context: Usain Bolt, the human, reached a peak speed of 10.44 metres per second during his 9.58-second 100-metre world record in Berlin in 2009. The machine is within touching distance.
Unitree Robotics had previously demonstrated its H1 humanoid sprinting at a recorded 10.1 metres per second — though the company itself acknowledged potential measurement error in that figure. MirrorMe claims Bolt is the first humanoid of its size to reliably sustain that kind of velocity outside of a controlled lab environment, making it a more verifiable benchmark.
The Team Behind the Machine
MirrorMe was founded in May 2024, drawing its core team from Zhejiang University, and says its focus on speed as a design priority stretches back nearly a decade of research. The company didn't start with humanoids: in 2025, its Black Panther quadruped robot — a four-legged machine — ran 100 metres in 13.17 seconds, reportedly outperforming Boston Dynamics in direct speed comparisons.
The Black Panther programme gave the team deep expertise in high-speed locomotion, energy-efficient actuation, and real-time balance control — foundations that translate directly into bipedal sprint performance.
An Accelerating Field
The broader field is moving fast. At the 2025 World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, Unitree's humanoids dominated the running events, taking four gold medals. Forecasters are already speculating that humanoid robots could break the 10-second 100-metre barrier in a controlled setting by late 2026 — a milestone that would carry enormous symbolic weight, even if sprint conditions aren't yet equivalent to a human athletics track.
The pace of development is such that records set in early 2026 may already be superseded by the time you read this. What's clear is that the gap between machine and human at top speed is now measurable in fractions of a metre per second rather than in comfortable multiples.
The race between humans and machines is, somewhat literally, on.