Unitree's 'Superman' can outrun Usain Bolt — but you can't buy one
Days before its Shanghai stock debut, Unitree posted a preview of a new humanoid it’s calling “Superman”: a 0.85 m-legged prototype that hit a 12.66 m/s top speed — faster than Usain Bolt’s 2009 100 m world record pace — and a 2 m standing jump. The company says it built the machine in a little over three months and that it’s still a work in progress.
That’s the whole announcement. No height, no weight, no battery life, no degrees-of-freedom count. No hands or end-effectors are visible in the demo footage — this is a legs-only locomotion platform, closer to a running-and-jumping benchmark than a general-purpose worker. Most importantly for anyone tracking what these machines actually cost: no price, no order page, no production timeline.
We’re adding Superman to the index anyway, filed as not-for-sale, for the same reason we track BYD’s Xiao Di and LG’s still-unnamed Nvidia humanoid: a credible manufacturer with real shipping products elsewhere is showing real hardware, and it’s worth a line in the table even when there’s nothing to buy. Unitree isn’t a company promising a robot someday — it already sells the G1 at $13,500 and the full-size H2 at $29,900, so a speed-and-jump record from the same lab carries more weight than a similar claim from a pre-revenue startup.
The timing is not incidental. Unitree’s shares started trading on Shanghai’s STAR Market on August 19 after an IPO oversubscribed more than 8,000 times, and a headline-grabbing “superhuman” robot lands well during IPO week. It also lands against the backdrop of the FCC’s new Covered List rule for Chinese humanoids and quadrupeds — a reminder that even if Superman eventually gets hands, a price and a ship date, it would still need to clear a national-security review before Unitree could sell it into the US.
We’ll update this entry if Unitree ever attaches a price, a configuration or an order channel to it; until then, treat the speed and jump numbers as company claims from an unverified demo, not a spec sheet.
Sources
Primary sources referenced in this article. Prices in the tables come from the live index and carry their own as-of dates.