Robots Race Humans in Beijing’s First Humanoid Half Marathon

Human-like robots raced alongside real participants in the Beijing half-marathon on Saturday – a world first. Twenty-one bipedal robots had to walk/run the 21.1km (13.1-mile) course, whose safety fences and other features kept the robots separate.

Tiangong Ultra wins the robot division.

The winner was Tiangong Ultra (Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Centre), which crossed the finish line in 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds. Perhaps not an impressive time for a human, but a fantastic feat of bipedal gait control and battery management, although somewhat tarnished by replaceable batteries, which could be changed, incurring a 10-minute penalty per change and further tarnished by the fact that the robots were closely controlled by humans rather than autonomously completing the task.

Not every robot finished the race, but several did. The main comedic moment of the day was one machine that fell at the starting line and lay motionless for several minutes before continuing.

Take Out: A glimpse of the future?

The images from the event are somewhat comedic compared to the robots’ abilities at Boston Dynamics. But, hey, you’ve got to be in it to win it.

This was an engineering challenge, perhaps of a more practical nature than the TV series Robot Wars. Whatever your take on this, running robots will get faster in the years ahead. Still, the task helped train machines to operate safely and autonomously in dynamic human environments.

If neither this nor the Enhanced Games are your thing, I have a Half Marathon coming up later in the year, though I suspect that won’t be that exciting to watch either!