Chinese Black Panther 2.0 breaks the world record of WildCat
The world record of the fastest-running quadruped robot, held by Boston Dynamics’ hydraulic quadruped robot WildCat for longer than a decade, has been broken by Black Panther 2.0, developed by a Chinese team.
Breakthroughs in speed and agility in robotic racing
On January 13th, 2025, the Humanoid Robot Innovation Institute of Zhejiang University Hangzhou Global Scientific and Technological Innovation Center (hereby referred to as the Innovation Institute) together with Mirror Me Technology and Hangzhou-based Kaierda Robot jointly released the quadruped robot, which can run at the speed of 10 m per second, a new world record.
The speed is also close to the men’s 100-m world record of 9.58 s, which was set by eight-time Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt from Jamaica in 2009. That is perhaps why it has been nicknamed “the Mechanic Monster,” weighing 38 kg and standing at 0.63 m tall, looking somewhat akin to a ready-to-attack Black German Shepherd.
The emergence of Black Panther 2.0 has been hailed by many as marking a significant breakthrough in exploring the performance boundaries of robots. “The Black Panther 2.0 is more than just a marvel of speed — it’s a glimpse into the future of robotics,” commented Jannat Un Nisa on Wonderful Engineering, a UK-based website for engineers to exchange their views, “with applications ranging from industrial tasks to disaster response, this innovation highlights the intersection of engineering, AI, and biomimicry.”
“The control scheme of Black Panther 2.0 is inherited from the ‘Imitation Relaxation Reinforcement Learning (IRRL)’ proposed during the research and development of its first-generation model, which were published in Nature Machine Intelligence in 2022,” said Jin Yongbin, a researcher from the Innovation Institute.
