Robot sprints to world record in Beijing half marathon
A humanoid robot won a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing and ran faster than the human world record in a show of China’s technological breakthroughs.
According to a WeChat post from the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Zone, also known as Beijing E-Town, where the race started, the winner from Chinese smartphone maker Honor completed the 21 km race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds.
This was much faster than world record holder Jacob Kiplimo of Uganda, who completed the same distance in around 57 minutes at the Lisbon road race in March.
The robot’s performance marked a significant improvement over last year’s inaugural race, when the winning robot completed the race in 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds.
However, the race did not go smoothly; One robot crashed at the starting line and the other crashed into the barrier.
Beijing E-Town said about 40 percent of the robots move autonomously on the course, while the others are controlled remotely.
Technology in China has turned into an area of competition with the USA in terms of national security.
Beijing’s latest five-year plan promises to target the frontiers of science and technology.
Accelerating the development of products such as humanoid robots and their applications is part of the 2026-2030 plan for the world’s second-largest economy.
London-based technology research and advisory group Omdia recently ranked three Chinese companies (AGIBOT, Unitree Robotics and UBTech Robotics Corp.) as the only first-tier vendors in a global assessment of shipment numbers of general-purpose embodied intelligent robots.
All shipped more than 1,000 units last year, with the top two companies shipping more than 5,000 units, the report said.
