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A humanoid robot aptly named Lightning made past connected the streets of Beijing implicit the weekend, beating the quality half-marathon satellite grounds by respective minutes.
Dozens of robots lined up for the Beijing E-Town Robot Half Marathon connected Sunday, tackling the 13-mile (21-kilometer) contention abstracted from quality runners.
Developed by Chinese smartphone institution Honor, Lightning completed the half-marathon successful conscionable implicit 50 minutes, besting the quality satellite grounds for the region of implicit 57 minutes.
A Lightning humanoid robot by Honor crosses the decorativeness enactment of the 2nd Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half Marathon successful Beijing, China, April 19, 2026.
Reuters/Maxim Shemetov
Lightning's creators were delighted with the result. Du Xiaodi, a improvement technologist astatine Honor, was speedy to gully comparisons with different industries.
"Looking ahead, immoderate of these technologies mightiness beryllium transferred to different areas," said Du. "It's akin to however the automotive manufacture initially developed done competitions."
The lawsuit tested robots successful real-world conditions, from equilibrium and endurance to navigation. Some ran autonomously, portion others were controlled remotely, each competing connected a parallel people to debar collisions with quality athletes.
It wasn't flawless. A fewer robots stumbled oregon veered disconnected course. But the advancement was striking compared to past year, erstwhile astir struggled to adjacent decorativeness the race.
Runners participating successful the 2nd Beijing E-Town Half Marathon instrumentality pictures of the Tiangong Ultra 2026 humanoid robot participating successful the Humanoid Robot Half Marathon successful Beijing, China, April 19, 2026.
Reuters/Tingshu Wang
Some spectators weren't disquieted by the failures.
"I'm precise excited," said Sun Zhigang. "First of all, it's the archetypal clip robots person surpassed humans, and that's thing I ne'er imagined."
"Their show is rather impressive," Jiang Liangzhi said. "I didn't expect the speeds to beryllium this accelerated already, and they're each precise stable."
Organizers said the marathon isn't truly astir speed. It's astir pushing robotics exertion beyond the laboratory with imaginable applications successful manufacturing, logistics and adjacent exigency response.
Chinese companies are pushing up with the improvement of robot technologies for some civilian and subject uses, but Beijing's robot half-marathon shows conscionable however accelerated the aboriginal is moving from subject fabrication to sporting reality.
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