In a historic event that blurred the line between technology and athleticism, robots took to the streets of Beijing to compete alongside thousands of runners in the world’s first man-vs-machine half-marathon.
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The 21-kilometre race was held in Yizhuang, a suburb of Beijing, and featured around 20 robotic teams from China. The robots came in various shapes and sizes — some as small as 120cm, while others, like the standout ‘Tiangong Ultra’, stood at 1.8 meters tall and weighed 52 kilograms.
As the race began, human participants eagerly photographed the bots, documenting the groundbreaking moment. While some robots struggled at the start — with the smaller ones tumbling several times — they drew cheers from spectators as they picked themselves back up and kept going.
The highlight of the event, ‘Tiangong Ultra’, completed the race in 2 hours, 40 minutes, and 42 seconds.
For comparison, the men’s and women’s human winners, both from Ethiopia, finished in 1 hour, 2 minutes, 36 seconds and 1 hour, 11 minutes, 7 seconds respectively. Notably, robots and human runners competed on separate tracks for safety and performance monitoring.
Speaking about the race, Tang Jian, Chief Technology Officer at the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, which developed Tiangong, commented on the robot’s performance saying: “‘We had set three goals for ourselves: first, to win the championship; second, to complete the entire half marathon with a single robot – a very important goal for us; and third, to finish the race in under three hours.
“We collected real-world running data from professional athletes and trained the robot so that its gait, cadence, stride length, and various postures could match those of professional runners as closely as possible.”
See photos from the event below……..
