Humanoid robot in China breaks human world record for half-marathon
A Humanoid robot made by a Chinese company on Sunday broke the human world record with a timing of 50 minutes 26 seconds in a race alongside amateur runners here on Sunday.
‘Flash,’ the Humanoid robot made by China’s Shenzhen Honor’ Smart Technology Development Co, Ltd, claimed victory at the 2026 Beijing E-Town half-marathon in autonomous navigation, beating the human world record of 57:20, official media here reported.
The men’s half-marathon world record was created by Uganda’s star distance runner Jacob Kiplimo at the Lisbon Half Marathon in Portugal last month.
Over 100 teams from China, Germany, France and Brazil took part in the race along with human runners.
In terms of competition rules, robots and human runners followed the same route of 21-kms but separate lanes to ensure safety, and the robot’s cutoff time was set at three hours and 40 minutes, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
The newly added format this year includes two ways of participation — remote control and autonomous navigation. For teams in remote control, their finishing times need to be multiplied by a coefficient of 1.2. About 40 per cent of the teams adopted autonomous navigation to achieve better results.
“The setting of coefficients aims to guide and encourage the research and development of autonomous navigation, which represents a technological foundation for humanoid robots to be applied in more scenarios in our daily life towards the future,” Liang Liang, deputy secretary-general of the Chinese Institute of Electronics, said.
On the human’s side of the E-Town half-marathon, China’s Zhao Haijie took the men’s title in one hour, seven minutes, and 47 seconds, while his compatriot Wang Qiaoxia was crowned in the women’s race with 1:18:06.
