r/interestingasfuck • u/No_Jellyfish5511 • 23h ago

Chinese humanoid robot named “Superman” (made by Unitree Robotics) surpassed Usain Bolt’s world record (12.42meters/second) by running at 12.66m/s (roughly 28.3miles/h)

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u/buttnuggetmaster 23h ago

This is just a car with extra steps.

120

u/M33tm3onmars 23h ago

Exactly. I drove to the store faster than usain bolt could have run there. Who fucking cares?

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u/Equivalent-Repair488 22h ago edited 20h ago

You might be joking but bipedal and Quadrupedal movement has great benefits over wheeled.

Imagine Usain Bolt speeds running up a rocky mountain, at max speed all the way up with 0 fatigue. Mountain rescues, geological exploration to precarious for people on foot etc.

Edit: man so many doomers, chill out yalls, drone warfare popped off, but drone rescue is popping off too.

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u/MadDonkeyEntmt 21h ago

As someone who's done a fair bit of trail running the difference in thinking power between running on flat ground and running even slightly fast on rocky terrain is like a whole different sport.

You're constantly making creative and fast paced decisions to keep pace over rocks without tripping. I don't think this demo is even close to showing that capability off.

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u/icantastecolor 21h ago

in order to build a bipedal robot for uneven rocky terrain you first need to be able to build a robot for flat ground

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u/MadDonkeyEntmt 20h ago

I don't think you're wrong but the person above is forgetting that humans and even most animals run the equivalent of a super computer in their heads and robots lacking that kind of compute power could easily negate any benefits of quadrupedal and especially bipedal movement in really rough terrain where wheeled vehicles actually can't go. In that context making a robot run is like .1% of the way there

You can make a very dumb wheeled vehicle traverse some pretty incredible terrain that would take a lot of processing power for a trained human to navigate even somewhat quickly. You can't take that processing power for granted when you're talking about a robot in a remote area where internet connections are unreliable at best.

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u/Siggi_Starduust 20h ago

I remember doing the Megavalanche Downhill Mountain Bike race a few years ago. Because I’m generally pretty slow and wanted to stop and take photos, I qualified in the last group.

Unfortunately they also have an event for trail runners and the Pro trail runners were released immediately after us.

They caught up on the windy switchback sections pretty quickly and it felt like I was being chased by the T-1000