A Humanoid Robot Set a Half-Marathon Record in China

Over the weekend successful China, a humanoid robot shattered satellite half-marathon record—the quality record—by 7 minutes.

The prima performer was a robot developed by the Chinese institution Honor (the smartphone maker), which finished the 13.1-mile contention successful 50 minutes, 26 seconds. The quality record, acceptable by Ugandan Olympic medalist Jacob Kiplimo, is 57 minutes, 20 seconds. The effect marks an awesome milestone particularly considering that, conscionable a twelvemonth earlier, the fastest robot astatine this half-marathon lawsuit took 2 and a fractional hours to implicit the aforesaid distance.

But Honor's robot was not the lone participant. The lawsuit consisted of much than 100 humanoid robots from 76 institutions crossed China. The robots lined up alongside 12,000 quality runners successful Beijing's E-Town, albeit connected abstracted courses to debar accidents. The opposition successful show betwixt humans and robots was much than evident.

Run, Robot, Run

A humanoid robot is designed to mimic the operation and question of the quality body, with legs, arms, and sensors that let it to interact with its environment. In this case, the winning robot incorporated features inspired by elite runners: agelong legs (almost a meter), precocious equilibrium systems, and a liquid cooling mechanism, akin to that of smartphones, to forestall overheating during the race.

In addition, galore of the participating robots operated autonomously, meaning without nonstop quality control. Thanks to artificial quality algorithms, they could set their pace, support balance, and accommodate to the terrain successful existent time. Notably, the Honor robot that achieved the 50-minute people operated autonomously. The Chinese shaper presented different robot, operated by distant control, that ran the aforesaid agelong successful adjacent little time: 48 minutes, 19 seconds.

As expected, determination were immoderate accidents successful the race. Some robots fell down, others veered disconnected the path, and respective needed method assistance on the way. While the carnal show of humanoid robots has precocious rapidly, their reliability is inactive developing. Of course, the laughter and jeers are nary longer arsenic predominant arsenic they utilized to be, replaced by applause and exclamations of surprise.

Robot Superiority

Just similar the robots that went viral for their awesome martial arts show a fewer weeks ago, this long-distance contention is portion of a broader strategy by China to amusement disconnected its enactment successful the improvement of precocious robots.

You don't request to beryllium a robotics adept to spot that this accomplishment demonstrates that machines tin outperform humans astatine circumstantial carnal tasks nether controlled conditions. (It's hard to ideate that the winning robot could execute the aforesaid result, for example, if it started to rainfall during the race.) But humans inactive person a fewer tricks up their sleeve: Running successful a consecutive enactment is precise antithetic from performing analyzable real-world activities, specified arsenic manipulating delicate objects oregon interacting socially.

However, it's understandable that the representation of a robot crossing the decorativeness enactment successful grounds time, up of quality athletes, raises respective questions. Is this the opening of a caller epoch successful which machines redefine carnal limits?

One could reason that a car is simply a machine, and those person ever been faster than humans. But a humanoid robot is designed to mimic humans. It's much alarming to spot 1 bushed humanity astatine its ain game—even if truthful galore of them are inactive tripping implicit themselves.

This communicative primitively appeared successful WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.