China’s humanoid robots are getting faster and more capable at a rate that’s making people uneasy.
In a few short years, Beijing’s state-backed Tiangong program has evolved from a clunky machine barely able to keep pace with a slow jogger to smashing human athletic records. China’s second World Humanoid Robot Games catapulted the AI powered robots into the global spotlight with viral races and spectacular crashes. Now, the team behind the record-breaking machines is preparing for something much bigger.
This is the story of how a government-initiated robotics project went from zero to superhuman performance at such an astonishing speed, and what China actually plans to do with the technology.
Beijing’s Humanoid Hub
Tiangong (Tien Kung) is a product of Beijing’s state-backed innovation hub, launched in November 2023 after the Chinese government set a national goal to mass manufacture humanoids within two years and to lead the market by 2027. It’s registered as the Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics in the Beijing Economic Technological Development Area, better known as Beijing E-Town.
An assortment of Chinese companies including the consumer electronics giant/EV maker Xiaomi’s robotics division, Shenzhen-based UBTECH, and the state-owned Beijing Jingcheng Machinery Electric Co. contributed about $42 million at launch. The government-backed Beijing Yizhuang Robot Technology joined shortly afterward with another $7 million, bringing its registered capital to about $49 million. According to state media reports, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institution of Automation contributed research expertise.
The center is led by Xiong Youjun. Described as its first employee, he also serves as chief technology officer of UBTECH, which he joined back in 2012. UBTECH was also identified as the lead organization and general manager unit behind the new center which later became known as X-Humanoid.
Tiangong Platform
The founding team moved remarkably quickly developing its first working humanoid prototypes.
By April 2024, they introduced their first general-purpose Tiangong humanoid. Its name is an old Chinese expression describing something crafted with such extraordinary skill that it seems like a work of heaven. In English, the name is spelled and pronounced the same as China’s space station, but in Mandarin that Tiangong is spelled differently to mean heavenly palace.
Standing 163 cm (5 feet 4 inches) and weighing 43 kg (95 lbs), the first-generation Tiangong was designed as a reference platform for researchers and developers to modify. Reports described it as the world’s first fully electric running humanoid robot, though Hangzhou-based Unitree’s all-electric H1 claimed the record for fastest humanoid on two legs a month earlier.
Tiangong was about 50 percent slower than Unitree’s full-sized humanoid with its reported speed of 6 km/h (3.7 mph). Still, its pace and its ability to adapt its gait across diverse terrain was notable for an adult-scale humanoid in early 2024.
An upgraded version of the humanoid, called Tiangong 1.2 MAX, debuted in August of that year during the World Robot Conference (WRC) in Beijing. That iteration stood taller at 173 cm (5 feet 8 inches) and weighed 60 kg (132 lbs). It played a prominent role in the conference’s opening ceremony, picking up the WRC emblem with both hands and placing it into a display.
Rapid Progress
Tiangong became known for its rapidly improving running capabilities in the months that followed.
In November 2024, a year after the innovation center’s founding, an upgraded version appeared during the end of the Beijing E-Town half marathon to finish alongside human participants. It was just a glimpse of what would follow.
In April 2025, a next-generation iteration called Tiangong Ultra won the first Humanoid Robot Half Marathon in Beijing. The humanoid was the clear winner of the race covering more than 21 km (13.1 miles). Tiangong Ultra followed a planned route using real-time location tracking, but could change direction and speed on its own. Engineers equipped it with light but strong leg joints that could handle the stress and impact for the long-distance test.
Four months later, X-Humanoid was one of the top competitors during the first World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. Tiangong Ultra won the 100-meter sprint in 21.5 seconds while operating fully autonomously. It also earned silver medals in the 400-meter, 1,500-meter, and 4×100 meter relay contests.
The robot’s athletic capabilities were impressive at the time, but still lagged behind recreational human runners.
Breaking the Human Barrier
2026 is when that changed.
During the second Humanoid Robot Half Marathon in April, a new and improved Tiangong Ultra completed the course in 1 hour and 15 minutes, cutting its running time from the prior year by more than half. More notably, the robot ran fully autonomously with zero human intervention, using its onboard cameras, LiDAR, inertial sensors, and artificial intelligence to determine its position, plan its route, avoid obstacles, and adjust its gate while navigating diverse terrain.
X-Humanoid said its average running speed more than doubled in under a year, thanks to its upgraded 400 Nm joints, liquid cooling, and reinforcement learning-based motion control. Though impressive, Tiangong’s 75-minute finish was still well behind the surprise winner named Lightning, developed by the Shenzhen smartphone maker Honor, a former Huawei sub-brand. Lightning finished the race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, completing the half marathon faster than the recognized human world record time.
Just a few months later, Tiangong Ultra beat its rival Lightning during the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. X-Humanoid engineers optimized the robot for speed and dynamic stability over humanlike aesthetics. Compared to the version that competed a year earlier, it had a much lighter body, higher output electric actuators, faster joint control, and improved whole-body motion software that empowered it to take very short rapid steps.
It broke the human 100-meter world record and won the large humanoid final in 8.64 seconds, surpassing Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second human record. The pace works out to an average speed of nearly 42 km/h (26 mph). A modified version of Tiangong, called Tianjiao, won the gold in the long jump competition, setting a new record for bipedal robots and coming just under a meter short of beating Mike Powell’s 1991 human world record at 7.97 m (26 feet 2 inches).
The robot did, however, beat the human world record in the standing high jump on opening night, reaching 2.88 m (9 feet 5 inches). Later in the games, a Tiangong robot jumped even higher at 3.4 m (11 feet 2 inches). For comparison, Javier Sotomayor’s running high-jump world record from 1993 is 2.45 m (8 feet).
X-Humanoid’s compact robot, Tiangong Omni, won the small humanoid 400-meter final during the robot Olympics. It finished in 45.66 seconds, beating Honor’s Yuanqizai by 2.81 seconds. The robot went viral for its awkward running style, leaning forward with its hands held near its face. X-Humanoid engineers said the robot chose the technique on its own through reinforcement learning training.
Tiangong Omni stands 135 cm (4 feet 5 inches) and weighs just under 40 kg (87 lbs). Before the robot games, Omni attracted attention for its ability to move on all fours in a confined space, resembling a military-style low crawl. Its form factor is similar to Unitree’s G1, which has become the default humanoid research platform at basically every institution with a robotics program. X-Humanoid’s short king has a reported 31 degrees of freedom (DoF) and more than 2,000 TFLOPS of AI-computing power.
Athletics Expose Tech Limits
X-Humanoid walked away from the games with a positive PR boost. It won 15 gold, 12 silver, and 18 bronze medals, totaling 45 over the 5 days of contests. But the spectacle also exposed the limits of its technology.
After completing a 100-meter sprint, Tiangong Ultra hit the stopping wall, went down, and caught fire. It was one of several viral moments that raised questions about whether high-performance humanoids can deliver any actual value in the real world.
The Shanghai startup Agibot’s total medal count surpassed X-Humanoid’s by one, winning on dexterous manipulation and workplace tasks that the innovation hub did not dominate.
Real-World Plans
X-Humanoid’s pitch is that the games are a test track while the product is a general-purpose platform for factories, warehouses, guided tours, and high-risk jobs. Many of its most practical tasks so far have been demonstrated by its wheeled work robot, Tian Yi 2.0, whose name translates to surpassing the heavens.
It stands up to 165 cm (5 feet 5 inches) and weighs about 88 kg (195 lbs). Its two 7-DoF arms offer a total payload capacity of up to 16 kg (35 lbs). The robot’s pricing reportedly starts around $49,000.
It runs on X-Humanoid’s self-developed embodied AI platform called Hui Si Kai Wu, which translates to using intelligence to understand and act upon the physical world. The system learns from large amounts of info in X-Humanoid’s RoboMind 2.0 dataset that contains more than 300,000 robot demo trajectories across 739 tasks, 129 skills, and six different types of robots. The set also includes over 12,000 demos with tactile data.
The AI integrates with the company’s XR-1 vision-language-action (VLA) model and Pelican Unify, which connects visual language understanding, a world model that learns and predicts physical dynamics, and an action control in one foundational model.
X-Humanoid says the setup empowers robots across form factors to understand natural language instructions, examine their surroundings, predict or imagine what will happen if they take an action, and then generate the physical movements needed to execute.
IPO Plans
During the 2026 World Robot Conference in Beijing, X-Humanoid CEO Xiong Youjun confirmed the company’s plans to pursue an IPO. It’s joining a growing array of Chinese firms seeking public listings for capital to scale next-gen machines following Unitree’s blockbuster debut on the Shanghai STAR Market.
Compared to its competitors, X-Humanoid occupies an unusual position as a commercial enterprise with government-backed strategic responsibilities. It also has indirect access to capital markets through UBTECH, but it cannot simply raise money through its shares.
According to X-Humanoid, it’s moving toward mass production of the third-generation version of its Tiangong robot. Powered by D-Robotics’ Sunrise S600 AI chip, the latest full-size Tiangong is geared toward industrial manufacturing, commercial services, and data collection in complex environments. X-Humanoid says it already has more than 120 of the robots training for over 30 scenarios, generating more than 500 hours of robot training data daily.
Though X Humanoid showcased its robots in the West during the latest Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, its products are unlikely to hit the US market anytime soon due to the FCC’s new restrictions on foreign-made robots.