The first ever half marathon allowing humanoid robots to run against humans was held in Beijing this weekend (April 2025). 12,000 humans ran the event alongside 21 robots…and for now the humans definitely are the winners.
A robot called Tiangong Ultra, was the robot winner, one of 6 robots that managed to finish. It completed the half marathon in just over 2 hours, 40 minutes. The fastest human, for comparison, finished in 1 hour 2 minutes and Jacob Kiplimo, of Uganga holds the half-marathon world record at 56 minutes 42 seconds set in Feb 2025 in Barcelona. The first world record from 1960 being 1 hour 7 minutes. The robots, therefore, have a long way to go.
The robots struggled in various ways reminiscent of human runners such as over-heating and finding it hard to even keep standing (though for humans the latter usually only happens towards the end, not on the start line as with one robot!). While humans need to constantly take water and nutrients, the winning robot similarly needed several battery changes. It’s winning performance was put down to it copying the way that human marathon runners run by Tang Jian, chief technology officer from the Beijing Innovation Centre of Human Robotics who built it. It also has relatively long legs which also is certainly an advantage to human runners (given it had mastered standing in the first place on such long legs).
Totally autonomous marathon running is relatively difficult for a machine because it takes physical ability, including dealing with kerbs, rough road surfaces and the like but also navigating the course and avoiding other runners. In this race the robots each had a team of human ‘trainers’ with them, in some cases giving them physical support, but also for safety (though one took out its trainer as it crashed into the side barriers!)
So the robots still have to make a lot of progress before they take the world record and show themselves to be superhuman as runners (as they have already done in games including chess, go, poker, jeopardy and more). Expect the records to tumble quickly, though, now they have entered the race.
Of course, a robot does not need to run on 2 legs at all, apart from due to our human centred preferences. Whilst it is a great, fun challenge for robotics researchers that helps push forward our understanding, it is plausible that the future of robotics is in some other form of locomotion: centipede-like perhaps with hundreds of creepy crawly legs, or maybe we will settle on centaur-like robots in the future (four legs being better than two for stability and speed). After all evolution has only settled on 2 legs because it has to work with what came before and standing upright is a way to free up our hands to do other things…so if designing from scratch why not go for 4 legs and 2 arms.
So the future of robot marathons is likely to involve a large number of categories from centipedal all the way down to humanoid. Of course, expect robot Formula 1 for wheeled self driving robots too in any future robot olympics. Will other robots ever enjoy watching such sport? That remains to be seen.
More on …
Subscribe to be notified whenever we publish a new post to the CS4FN blog.
This page is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.
cs4fn 