Robots beat human records at Beijing half-marathon

The winning runner astatine a Beijing half-marathon for humanoid robots finished the contention contiguous successful 50 minutes and 26 seconds — importantly faster than the quality satellite grounds of 57 minutes precocious acceptable by Jacob Kiplimo.

Comparing quality and robot moving times whitethorn look unfair; 1 societal media idiosyncratic observed, “my car tin outrun a cheetah too.” Still, the winning clip is simply a monolithic betterment implicit past year’s race, erstwhile the fastest robot finished successful 2 hours and 40 minutes. (Back then, I scoffed that this “would not beryllium an awesome clip for a human.”)

The Associated Press reports that this year’s victor was built by Chinese smartphone shaper Honor. It seems the winning robot wasn’t really the fastest, arsenic a antithetic Honor robot finished successful 48 minutes and 19 seconds. But that 1 was distant controlled — the 50:26 robot was autonomous and won owed to weighted scoring.

About 40% of participating robots competed autonomously, portion the remaining 60% were distant controlled, according to Beijing’s E-Town tech hub. Not each of them did arsenic good arsenic Honor’s robots, with 1 robot falling astatine the starting enactment and different hitting a barrier.