China’s first robot marathon runners trip, emit smoke, fall apart

Some of China’s best humanoid robots took on the challenge of racing against human marathon runners on Saturday. One fell at the starting line. Another’s head fell off and rolled on the ground. And one collapsed and broke into pieces.

In what was billed as the world’s first half-marathon for androids, just four out of 21 robotic runners completed the race in Beijing’s southern tech hub of E-Town within the allotted four hours. The winner was five-foot-ten Tiangong Ultra, who made it to the finish line in two hours and 40 minutes, far behind the hourlong performance of the human gold medalists. It took more than three hours for the other three bots that managed to complete the 13 mile (20.9 kilometer) course to come in.

The man-versus-machine competition was presented as a showcase for China’s ambition in areas from AI to robotics to semiconductors. President Xi Jinping’s government has made the development of the key technologies a priority, ratcheting up trade tension with the US.

Yet the result was often comical, with accidents and dropouts throughout the race. While Tiangong paced around five miles per hour and looked like a proper athlete, many of its robotic peers weren’t designed to run quickly enough to finish the race within the time.

The Tiangong Ultra model was tailor-made for the race by Beijing-based X-Humanoid, a government-backed research institute that also has funding from Xiaomi Corp. and robotics upstart UBTech Robotics Corp Ltd.

Winner of the world’s first robot half marathon in Beijing: Tiangong Ultra developed by UB Tech