Humanoid ‘Lightning’ robot smashes the half-marathon record

An autonomous scarlet robot named “Lightning” finished a 13-mile race in Beijing on Sunday in just 50 minutes and 26 seconds, less than half the time of last year’s fastest robot, which took two hours and 40 minutes. As Reuters reports, Du Xiaodi, one of the engineers who developed Lightning at smartphone company Honor, said the robot “was in development for a year, fitted with legs 90 to 95 cm (35 to 37 inches) long to mimic elite human runners and liquid cooling technology used in its smartphones.”

Lightning not only won the half-marathon, beating all 12,000 human runners, but also beat the human world record of 57 minutes and 20 seconds, set by Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo.

At last year’s race, only six out of 21 robots managed to complete the half-marathon at all, and didn’t come close to winning. A total of 300 robots from 102 robot teams competed this year and 47 teams finished the race, including 18 teams using autonomous robots and 29 that relied on remote control.

The fastest human runner this year finished almost twenty minutes behind Lightning, with a time of one hour, seven minutes, and 47 seconds, but no humans made the podium. The three fastest runners were all Lightning robots.

According to the Associated Press, the second and third place robots were other autonomous Lightning models that finished with times of 51 minutes and 53 minutes, respectively. There was also a remote-controlled Lightning that had the fastest time overall at 48 minutes and 19 seconds, but Chinese outlet Global Times says that due to how race results were weighted for the different categories, the autonomous version of Lightning was given first place.