While we live in times where AI seems to be playing an increasingly large and prominent role in daily life, innovation is also happening in other areas: last weekend, a robot ran a half marathon in Beijing, and that piece of technology covered the 21.1 kilometers in a time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds. This makes the robot nearly seven minutes faster than Jacob Kiplimo, the Ugandan who improved the world record for the half marathon to 57:20 minutes earlier this year.
In the past, several attempts were made to have a robot run a faster time than the human world record for a half marathon, but until now, none were successful. The robot that finally succeeded was developed by the Chinese smartphone manufacturer Honor. Multiple robots made an attempt on a course that ran parallel to the course taken by human participants in the Beijing Half Marathon: this was done to prevent collisions between humans and robots.
Last year, the fastest robot ran only 2:40:00, a time that has now, just one year later, been vastly improved. Not everything went perfectly this time either; several robots fell right at the start or ran into obstacles, and the winning robot also crashed straight into the fences just after the finish. Forty percent of the robots navigated autonomously, while the rest were remote-controlled.
In the video below, you can see footage of the winning robot, as well as slower robots and robots that fell early on.