Lightning the humanoid robot didn’t have to get a good night’s rest or lace up its shoes. Instead, its toughest challenge in running this year’s Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon was avoiding a collision with more than 300 other running robots. Lightning strode across the finish line in 50 minutes, 26 seconds, a time faster than the human half-marathon world record (57 minutes, 20 seconds). It was the first time a robot has beaten the human record.
In the inaugural Beijing robot race last year, the top robot took more than three times as long as Lightning. The robots were faster and more autonomous this time, according to Alan Fern, a robotics professor at Oregon State University. “What appears to have changed this year is that some of China’s many humanoid companies have invested the engineering effort needed to make these systems robust enough for a long-duration race,” he says. “That is genuinely impressive.”