Unitree Robotics dropped a 30-second video on Weibo Monday that's been blowing up across tech circles ever since. The clip shows a humanoid robot the company calls "Superman" doing things no machine its size should be able to do. Standing just 0.85 meters tall at the leg, it can jump two meters straight up from a dead stop and hit 12.66 meters per second on flat ground. That's 45.6 kilometers per hour. For comparison, Usain Bolt's top speed was about 44.7 km/h. The robot doesn't just match human records, it beats them outright.
Here's what makes this wild. Unitree said they built the entire machine from scratch in just over three months. Not years. Months. And they're already saying there's plenty of room to make it faster and jump higher. The timing isn't random either. Unitree is days away from becoming the first general-purpose robotics company to list on mainland China's stock market, and this reveal is clearly meant to build momentum. In a parallel development, Google DeepMind is giving robots more capable brains, a development that could make future versions of Superman smarter, not just faster.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA's Jetson Thor is giving robots the processing power they need to handle complex real-world tasks at speed. The hardware is here. The brains are catching up. And Unitree just proved the legs are ready too.