- An Honor robot has broken a world record in the half marathon
- The time was set during a joint human and humanoid race.
- More than 100 robots signed up, and almost half of them were autonomous.
Humanoid robot runners performed noticeably better at the second Humanoid Robot Half Marathon in Beijing than at last year's inaugural event, even beating the fastest time ever set by a flesh-and-blood person, but there were still plenty of technical challenges and setbacks along the way.
As reported by Interesting Engineering and others, the race was led by the Honor Lightning robot, which completed the 13.1-mile/21.1-kilometer course in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. This beats the world record of 57 minutes and 20 seconds set by Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo last month.
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It's also a big improvement over the fastest robot time recorded at the 2025 event, which was 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds. This year, robots defeated people for the first time, although humans raced on a separate track to avoid collisions and injuries caused by wayward machines.
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According to Honor engineer Du Xiaodi, Lightning's prowess is due in part to its long legs (measuring 0.95 meters or 37.4 inches) and a custom liquid cooling system developed in-house. Controlling temperature and avoiding overheating is actually one of the most difficult aspects of getting humanoid robots into races like this.
“From the beginning of the design, our robot was inspired by outstanding human athletes, with long legs of approximately 0.95 meters,” he said. “This is a big improvement and a highlight in terms of appearance and design. We equipped it with a very powerful liquid cooling system, which has also been largely developed by ourselves.”
'Just like a T-1000'
Another significant change this year: Nearly half of the robots in the race were autonomous, meaning no human controls were necessary. The robots had everything they needed on board to navigate the course and complete the race, although some manual battery changes were necessary along the way.
More than 100 robots participated in this year's race, compared to 20 last year, but as you can see in the video below, not all of them successfully made it to the finish line. In fact, some of them had difficulty crossing the starting line, showing that there is still a lot of room for improvement when it comes to these robot athletes.
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Of course, the main goal of these humanoid robots is not to run races, but to develop them to a level where they can be as useful as possible, whether on an assembly line or in a disaster zone that is too dangerous for a human to address. Speed and dexterity are crucial for robots in many scenarios.
Online reactions have been mixed: despite the technical prowess on display, many observers are concerned about keeping the bots under control. One commentator compares racing droids to “how the T-1000 raced to catch John Connor” on Terminator 2while another says “I just want one to clean my house.”
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