An autonomous scarlet robot named “Lightning” completed a 13-mile race in Beijing on Sunday in just 50 minutes and 26 seconds, less than half the time of last year’s fastest robot, which took two hours and 40 minutes. As reuters According to the report, Du Xiaodi, one of the engineers who developed Lightning at smartphone company Honor, said the robot “had been in development for a year, with 90 to 95 cm (35 to 37 in) long legs designed to mimic typical human runners and the liquid cooling technology used in its smartphones.”
Lightning not only beat all 12,000 human runners to win the half-marathon, but also broke the human world record of 57 minutes and 20 seconds set by Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo.
In last year’s race, only six out of 21 robots managed to complete the half-marathon, and didn’t even come close to winning. This year a total of 300 robots from 102 robot teams competed and 47 teams completed the race, including 18 teams using autonomous robots and 29 teams relying on remote control.
This year’s fastest human runner finished nearly twenty minutes behind Lightning with a time of one hour, seven minutes and 47 seconds, but no human reached the podium. The three fastest runners were Lightning robots.
According to the Associated Press, the second- and third-place robots were other autonomous Lightning models that finished with times of 51 minutes and 53 minutes, respectively. There was also a remote-controlled Lightning whose total time was the fastest at 48 minutes and 19 seconds, but the Chinese outlet Global Times says the autonomous version of the Lightning was awarded first place because of how race results were weighted for different categories.
<a href