To prepare for an incredibly ridiculous opening ceremony, Beijing is scaling back its humanoid robot half-marathon. Luckily, the event that pits humanoid robots made by Chinese companies against each other over a distance of 13 miles got a lot easier this year.
More than 100 competitors took part in this year’s half-marathon, with first place going to Honor, known for its smartphones and red-clad robot named Lightning. True to his name, the gold medalist completed the race in 50 minutes and 26 seconds. That’s several minutes faster than the human record set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo last month.
According to state-sponsored television news agency CCTV, Honor took the other podium places, with the important caveat that they all navigated the course autonomously. This is a big improvement from last year, where the fastest time among 21 robots was achieved by Tiangong Ultra with a record of two hours and 40 minutes. At last year’s event, several bipedal robots received assistance from human operators running alongside them, as well as some ridiculous accidents, such as falling at the starting line.
however, BBC It was reported that about 40 percent of the robots competed autonomously this year, while the rest were remote-controlled. Despite the rapid improvements, this year’s event still had its fair share of crashes, even from Honor’s robots.
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