The winning runner at the Beijing Half-Marathon for a humanoid robot today completed the race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds – significantly faster than the human world record of 57 minutes recently set by Jacob Kiplimo.
It may seem unfair to compare human and robot running times; a social media user saw“My car can outrun a cheetah.” Nevertheless, the winning time is a vast improvement over last year’s race, when The fastest robot finished in two hours and 40 minutes. (At the time, I scoffed that this “wouldn’t be an impressive amount of time for a human being.”)
Associated Press report This year’s winner was made by Chinese smartphone maker Honor. It seems the winning robot wasn’t actually the fastest, as a different Honor robot finished in 48 minutes and 19 seconds. But it was remote controlled – 50:26 The robot was autonomous and won due to weighted scoring.
According to Beijing’s E-Town tech hub, about 40% of the participating robots competed autonomously, while the remaining 60% were remote controlled. Not all of them performed as well as Honor’s robots, with one robot falling at the starting line and another hitting an obstacle.
