Overview
- Beijing staged a tougher 21-kilometer race for hundreds of humanoid robots on a course kept separate from human runners to prevent collisions.
- Media reports say Honor’s Lightning posted 48:19 by remote control and 50:26 running on its own, faster than the human mark, with a 1.2 time multiplier for remote entries giving the win to the autonomous robot.
- Organizers required roughly 40% of the machines to navigate on their own, which meant recognizing obstacles, choosing a path, and keeping pace without live human input.
- Finish rates and speed jumped from last year’s shaky debut, when many robots failed and the winner needed about 2 hours 40 minutes, with training clips this year showing top speeds near 14 km/h.
- Coverage cites longer legs of about 95 cm and water cooling to curb overheating as design gains, though many entrants still stumbled or hit barriers, underscoring fast progress with uneven reliability in a market where Chinese firms are scaling up production.