Robots Complete a Half Marathon — at a Very Slow Pace

Humanoid robots still have a lot of ground to cover before they can match human runners. On Saturday, Beijing’s E-Town tech hub held what it called the world’s first half-marathon for humanoid robots, featuring 21 robotic participants running alongside thousands of human competitors.

According to Bloomberg, the race’s top-performing robot, Tiangong Ultra, was developed by the state-supported research institute X-Humanoid and completed the half-marathon in 2 hours and 40 minutes. While that’s a notable feat for a robot, it pales in comparison to human runners — the event’s fastest male runner finished in just over an hour, and many recreational runners typically clock in under two hours.

Most Robots, Including Tiangong Ultra, Needed Guidance to Complete the Race

Tiangong Ultra didn’t go it alone, either. It relied on a human running ahead wearing a signaling device on their back, allowing the robot to mimic their movements. In fact, most of the participating robots required some form of human assistance or remote control, often with operators running alongside them.

Most Robots Struggled to Complete the Race, With Some Malfunctioning Right Out of the Gate

Bloomberg reports that all the other humanoid robots took at least three hours to finish the race, and only four managed to cross the finish line before the four-hour cutoff. Some didn’t even make it past the starting area — one robot named Shennong tripped a human guide, crashed into a fence, and broke apart. Another, Little Giant, the shortest robot at just 30 inches tall, came to a stop mid-race as smoke began to rise from its head.

The event — the Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half Marathon — featured robots built by Chinese companies and student teams. (Unitree’s G1 bot fell at the starting line, though the company said a client ran it without the correct algorithms.)

To qualify, each robot had to have a humanoid shape and run on two legs. They ran in a separate lane from the human participants, with staggered starts to avoid collisions. Teams were allowed to swap out batteries — Tiangong Ultra needed three changes — and could even replace robots mid-race, though doing so came with a time penalty.

X-Humanoid’s CTO, Tang Jiang, told Reuters, “I don’t want to boast, but I think no other robotics firms in the West have matched Tiangong’s sporting achievements.”

Read the original article on: TechCrunch

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