Beijing's Robot Half-marathon Is Back For Its Second Year With Far Less Embarassing Results

To dress up for an incredibly laughable inaugural event, Beijing is moving backmost its humanoid robot half-marathon. Fortunately, nan arena that pits humanoid robots made by Chinese companies against each different crossed 13 miles went a batch smoother this year.

This year's half-marathon hosted much than 100 competitors, pinch first spot going to Honor, amended known for its smartphones, and its red-clad robot named Lightning. Living up to nan name, nan golden medalist vanished nan title successful 50 minutes and 26 seconds. That's respective minutes faster than nan quality grounds that was precocious group by Uganda's Jacob Kiplimo past month.

Honor swept nan different podium spots, pinch nan important caveat that they each navigated nan people autonomously, according to nan state-sponsored tv news agency CCTV. That's a monolithic betterment complete past year, wherever nan fastest clip among 21 robots was achieved by Tiangong Ultra pinch a grounds of 2 hours and 40 minutes. Last year's arena saw galore of nan bipedal robots receiving assistance from quality operators who ran alongside them, arsenic good arsenic immoderate comical mishaps, for illustration falling astatine nan starting line.

However, nan BBC reported that astir 40 percent of nan robots competed autonomously this year, while nan remainder were remote-controlled. Despite nan accelerated improvements, this year's arena still had its fair stock of crashes, moreover from Honor's robots.