After Outrunning Usain Bolt, China's Robot Champion Races Towards Real-World Work

A week after his robot outran humanity's fastest man, Jack Guo is already chasing a harder goal.TianGong Ultra stunned spectators at the World Humanoid Robot Games when it covered 100 metres in 8.64 seconds, almost a full second faster than Usain Bolt's world record. Behind the feat were days of round-the-clock testing and repairing battered robots between races."When it started smoothly and got past 50 metres, that was when I finally relaxed," said Guo, who leads development of Ultra and Omni, a smaller model used in 400m races, at the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Centre, known as X-Humanoid.Just a week later, the bespectacled 34-year-old engineer is already focused on a bigger challenge."We want to turn high performance into high reliability and high usability," he told Reuters in his first interview with foreign media.The record-breaking run offers a rare window into China's growing lead in humanoid robotics, where state-backed research, deep…