A humanoid robot built by Chinese smartphone maker Honor crossed the finish line of a Beijing half-marathon Sunday in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, faster than the human world record for the distance, in a state-backed showcase of China's robotics ambitions. The winning time at the Beijing E-Town Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon undercut the 57-minute mark set by Uganda's Jacob Kiplimo in Lisbon last month, according to a WeChat post by the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area, also known as Beijing E-Town.
The race doubles as a research showcase and a policy signal. Beijing's 2026-2030 five-year plan, which vows to "target the frontiers of science and technology", names humanoid robotics as a development priority, according to PBS NewsHour. Sunday's winning time was a more-than-threefold improvement on last year's inaugural race, whose winning robot finished in 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds.
What Honor built
The Honor robot was modeled on elite human runners, with legs of about 95 centimeters (37 inches) and an in-house liquid-cooling system, said Du Xiaodi, a test development engineer at the company. "Looking ahead, some of these technologies might be transferred to other areas", Du said. "For example, structural reliability and liquid-cooling technology could be applied in future industrial scenarios".
Beijing E-Town said about 40 percent of the robots on the course navigated autonomously, while the rest were remotely controlled. State broadcaster CCTV reported the runners-up, also from Honor, finished in about 51 and 53 minutes and also used autonomous navigation. State-run Global Times reported that a separate, remotely-controlled Honor robot actually crossed the finish line first at 48 minutes and 19 seconds, but the championship went to the autonomous winner under the event's weighted scoring rules.
The asterisk
The event was not a clean human-machine comparison. One robot fell at the start line; another bumped into a barrier. The remote-control option, used by most of the field, blurs how much of Sunday's result reflects onboard decision-making versus skilled human piloting. The Associated Press, via PBS NewsHour, noted that widespread commercialization of humanoid robots remains some way off. Spectator Sun Zhigang, who watched last year's race, said he felt "enormous changes this year" and called Sunday's result "the first time robots have surpassed humans".
The industry behind it
London-based research firm Omdia recently ranked three Chinese companies — AGIBOT, Unitree Robotics and UBTech Robotics Corp. — as the only first-tier vendors in its global assessment of shipments of general-purpose embodied intelligent robots, according to PBS NewsHour. Each shipped more than 1,000 units last year, with the top two shipping more than 5,000. PBS NewsHour reported that Beijing now frames technology as an arena of competition with the United States with national security implications.
The next humanoid test in Beijing is expected next year, with organizers likely to tighten autonomy rules if Sunday's remote-control debate sticks.