Usain Bolt is currently the fastest human being on the earth, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something faster than him. In fact, Bolt was recently beaten by a Korean velociraptor robot.
A group of students at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology designed the dinosaur robot with the intent of beating the Jamaican gold medalist. The dinosaur was built to beat Bolt’s current fastest speed of 27.44 miles per hour.
The robot was built with metal legs and shock-absorbing components that allow the legs to work much like an Achilles tendon. When the group had finished building the robot named Raptor, it was able to run at 28.5 miles per hour.
Of course, Bolt and Raptor didn’t actually race, but since Raptor was able to achieve the 28.5 miles per hour speed on a treadmill, the group was confident that he could beat Bolt in a real life race as well.
Raptor isn’t the first robot built for speed. Another group recently created a robot that was designed to mimic the running action of a Cheetah. The Cheetah robot was only able to reach a maximum speed up to 18 miles per hour at first, but the group has since tweaked it to make it faster and now it might even be fast enough to beat Bolt and Raptor.
Both groups plan to continue to make their robots faster. They cannot physically race each other or anything else right now because they have to be connected to a pole on a treadmill that prevents them from falling over as they run.
Bolt on the other hand is always happy to race humans or objects. In the past Bolt has raced a bus and other incredibly fast humans. He is currently training for the 2016 Olympic games where he will defend his title.
“One of my main goals is to go to the Rio Olympics, as I was saying, to do it again,” Bolt said. “To defend my titles and it’s never been done three times so, for me, that’s me trying to set the bar as high as possible. To just push the barrier.”
If Bolt is able to perform well at the Olympics, he may even retire.
“So far it’s after the Olympics in Rio,” Bolt said of when he could retire. “If I’m in great shape and I go there and do what I have to do, I think it would be a good time to retire on top and having dominated for so long.”
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Image via Wikimedia Commons