{"id":618857,"date":"2026-04-20T09:13:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T09:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/618857\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T09:13:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T09:13:12","slug":"chinese-humanoid-robot-beats-human-half-marathon-world-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/618857\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese humanoid robot beats human half-marathon world record"},"content":{"rendered":"

The humanoid robot that won a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing has run faster than the human world record holder in a show of China’s latest technological leaps.<\/p>\n

The winner from Honor, a Chinese smartphone maker, reportedly completed the 21-kilometre race on Sunday in 50 minutes and 26 seconds.<\/p>\n

That was faster than the human world record holder, Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo, who finished the same distance in about 57 minutes in March at the Lisbon road race.<\/p>\n

The performance by the robot marked a significant step forward from last year’s inaugural race, during which the winning robot finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds.<\/p>\n

But the competition, which was held alongside a race for humans, was not without hiccups \u2014 one robot fell flat at the start line, another bumped into a barrier.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The winning robot finished significantly faster that last year’s winner. (AP: Andy Wong)<\/p>\n

Du Xiaodi, Honor’s test development engineer, said his team was happy with the results.<\/p>\n

Mr Du said its robot design was modelled on outstanding human athletes, with long legs of about 95 cm, and was equipped with what he called a powerful liquid-cooling system which was largely developed in-house.<\/p>\n

“Looking ahead, some of these technologies might be transferred to other areas,” he said.<\/p>\n

“For example, structural reliability and liquid-cooling technology could be applied in future industrial scenarios.”<\/p>\n

The race is on to build the best humanoid robot <\/a><\/p>\n

There is now a global race to build humanoids that can walk, talk, reason, lift, carry, fetch, stack and generally operate in a human environment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While it will still take time to achieve widespread commercialisation of humanoid robots, spectators were already impressed by the robots.<\/p>\n

Sun Zhigang, who had been in the audience last year, watched the race with his son.<\/p>\n

“I feel enormous changes this year,” Mr Sun said.<\/p>\n

“It’s the first time robots have surpassed humans and that’s something I never imagined.”<\/p>\n

Wang Wen, who came with his family, said robots seemed to have stolen much of the spotlight from human runners in the event.<\/p>\n

“The robots’ speed far exceeds that of humans,” he said.<\/p>\n

“This may signal the arrival of sort of a new era.”\"A<\/p>\n

Human runners take pictures of the humanoid robots running. (AP: Haruna Furuhashi\/Pool Photo\u00a0)<\/p>\n

Beijing E-Town said about 40 per cent of the robots navigated the course autonomously, while the others were remotely controlled.<\/p>\n

State media outlet Global Times reported a separate, remotely-controlled robot from Honor was the first to cross the finish line in 48 minutes and 19 seconds.<\/p>\n

But it said the winning one used autonomous navigation and won the championship under the event’s weighted scoring rules.<\/p>\n

State broadcaster CCTV reported that the runners-up, which were also from Honor and used autonomous navigation, finished the race in about 51 minutes and 53 minutes respectively.<\/p>\n

A robot served as a traffic officer to direct the participants with its arm gestures and voice, CCTV added.<\/p>\n

In China, technology has evolved into an area of competition with the US with national security implications.<\/p>\n

Beijing’s latest five-year plan vows to “target the frontiers of science and technology”.<\/p>\n

Speeding up the development of products like humanoid robots and their applications is part of the 2026-2030 plan for the world’s second-largest economy.<\/p>\n

AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The humanoid robot that won a half-marathon race for robots in Beijing has run faster than the human…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":618858,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[64,63,3686,512,300128,35816,54429,17895,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-618857","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-beijing","11":"tag-china","12":"tag-half-marathon","13":"tag-honor","14":"tag-humanoid-robots","15":"tag-robots","16":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}