Beijing’s robotic half-marathon is again for its second 12 months with far much less embarassing outcomes

To make up for an extremely laughable inaugural event, Beijing is working again its humanoid robotic half-marathon. Thankfully, the occasion that pits humanoid robots made by Chinese language corporations towards one another throughout 13 miles went quite a bit smoother this 12 months.

This 12 months’s half-marathon hosted greater than 100 opponents, with first place going to Honor, higher identified for its smartphones, and its red-clad robotic named Lightning. Residing as much as the identify, the gold medalist completed the race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. That is a number of minutes sooner than the human report that was not too long ago set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo final month.

Honor swept the opposite podium spots, with the necessary caveat that all of them navigated the course autonomously, in accordance with the state-sponsored tv information company CCTV. That is an enormous enchancment over final 12 months, the place the quickest time amongst 21 robots was achieved by Tiangong Extremely with a report of two hours and 40 minutes. Final 12 months’s occasion noticed lots of the bipedal robots receiving help from human operators who ran alongside them, in addition to some comical mishaps, like falling on the beginning line.

Nonetheless, the BBC reported that round 40 % of the robots competed autonomously this 12 months, whereas the remaining had been remote-controlled. Regardless of the speedy enhancements, this 12 months’s occasion nonetheless had its fair share of crashes, even from Honor’s robots.