During an event in China, the CEO of Unitree Robotics stated that humanoids will be able to run 100 m in less than 10 seconds, that is, faster than Usain Bolt. If that happens, we would no longer be talking only about efficient thefts, but about physically superior machines. In recent months, progress has accelerated significantly, because a robot developed in Shanghai has already reached speeds close to 10 m per second, an important milestone not only for speed, but also for stability and control during the run. motion.

Because running fast is not the biggest challenge, the real problem is not falling, today some of these platforms already manage to maintain constant performance in long-distance races, Unitree itself assures that its robos already surpass most of its employees in physical endurance, but speed is only part of the story.

The real plan is in scale, the company has already provided its partners with more than 5,000 robots in a single year and now he wants to transform that into an ecosystem, as if it were a kind of application store for robots where developers from all over the world can create skills and install them directly on the machines, this would completely change the game, because instead of programming robots one by one, millions of them would simply be updated at the same time, exactly as happens with smartphones.

And there comes the next phase, what they call the “GPT chat moment” of robotics, the idea is to use video-based models to teach robots to understand the world as we humans understand it, observing, interpreting, generalizing, when that happens, the impact could be even greater in speed, because it will not just be a fast robot, it will be a robot that understands, learns and adapts and perhaps the most impressive detail is at the end of this vision, robots that begin to build other robots.

Unitree itself is already testing this in its factories, machines assembling parts of themselves, closing a cycle that until recently seemed impossible, but strength and speed alone do not solve everything, because the real world is not predictable and that is where the real challenge begins.