iStockphoto
We humans just can’t help ourselves. Now scientists in China have created the world’s fastest humanoid robot.
Dubbed “Evolution V3.0” by its creators at Unitree, the 5-foot-11, less than 110 pound H1 humanoid robot is capable of reaching speeds of 11 miles per hour.
By comparison, Atlas, the humanoid robot created by Boston Dynamics, only has a top speed of 5.5 miles per hour. The record for humans is 27.78 miles per hour by track star Usain Bolt, however, the average person jogs around 4 to 6 miles per hour and has an average sprinting speed of about 10 to 14 miles per hour, so their is still reason for concern.
In video released this month, Unitree shows Evolution V3.0 reaching a top speed of 7.4 miles per hour. The video also shows the H1 humanoid robot dancing, jumping, picking up objects, and going up and down a set of stairs.
The really scary part of this isn’t so much the speed of the Unitree H1 humanoid robot as it is the fact that it can still maintain its balance when someone tries to knock it over.
According to Live Science, “H1 navigates using 3D LIDAR technology to constantly map its surroundings in 360 degrees while using a front-facing visual depth camera to judge distances. The joints that make up the hip or pelvis area — to which its legs are fixed — provide a maximum torque of 360 newton-metre (Nm), which gives the system the means to swing its legs back and forth faster. That’s compared to a train, which has around 40,000Nm, and GMC’s Hummer EV, which has a little over 15,000Nm.”
Another robot, Agility Robotics’ Cassie, had already previously run a 100 meter sprint in 24.73 seconds at 9 miles per hour – a world record for a bipedal robot, but as shown in the video below, Cassie isn’t exactly what one would call a “humanoid” robot as it has no upper body.