Your next half-marathon could be getting some robotic flair.
Humanoid robots ran beside real humans during a 13.1-mile race in China this past Saturday in a world first. 21 high-tech machines joined about 12,000 human racers at the Beijing event, though to separate the two, a divider was used on the course, Wired reported.
As for how the bipedal robots faired, only six managed to successfully finish the course, with almost every robot falling down and combating overheating issues, according to Wired. The robots ran the Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon under a set of strict guidelines, such as allowing for pit stops to swap out batteries.
The winner of the robot race was the Tiangong Ultra, who completed the competition in two hours and 40 minutes—in comparison, the slowest time for human racers was three hours and 10 minutes, Wired reported. Developed by Chinese robotic company UBTech and the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, Tiangong Ultra (standing at five feet, nine inches) was also the only machine that snagged a human participation award. It needed to have its batteries changed three times throughout the trek, though it fell only once.
The humanoid robot alongside human runners.
VCG/VCG via Getty Images
For this race in particular, only bipedal robots were allowed to compete, meaning that they did not run on wheels. Each robot also had its own human operators, usually a group of two of three who jogged alongside it throughout the race. For some of the tech, the human counterparts had control panels to help control the robot’s speed, while others attempted to aid them by clearing the path, according to Wired.
And though many robots struggled, the race showed off how humanoid-robot tech has advanced.
“Until five years ago or so, we didn’t really know how to get robots to walk reliably. And now we do, and this will be a good demonstration of that,” Alan Fern, a robotics professor at Oregon State, told Wired ahead of the event.
Robots, of course, have been present in other industries besides sports. BMW was experimenting with humanoid robots, created by the folks at tech company Figure, to help speed up production last year, and Boston Dynamic unveiled its next-gen Atlas last April.
