In a surreal blend of endurance race and sci-fi slapstick, 21 humanoid robots jogged, limped, and faceplanted their way through a half-marathon in Beijing. While 12,000 human runners tackled the standard 13.1 miles solo, the robot racers came with full pit crews, battery changes, duct-taped limbs, and the occasional leash.
The event—billed as the world’s first humanoid robot half-marathon run alongside humans (though on a separate track)—was organized by Beijing’s municipal government and several robotics groups. Only six robots managed to finish the course. Most didn’t even make it past the livestream’s first 15 minutes.
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The fastest finisher was Tiangong Ultra, a bipedal robot built by UBTech and the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center. After falling once and undergoing three battery changes, it crossed the finish line in 2 hours, 40 minutes, and 42 seconds—just under the cutoff for a human participation award.
Alan Fern, a robotics professor at Oregon State University, told WIRED that the achievement wasn’t about speed, but about mechanical reliability. “The impressive thing about going from a 5K to a half-marathon is really a hardware robustness problem,” he said. “Until five years ago or so, we didn’t really know how to get robots to walk reliably. And now we do, and this will be a good demonstration of that.”
Humanoid Robots Tried to Beat Humans in a Half-Marathon. Most of Them Ran Out of Battery.
It wasn’t flawless. Nearly every robot fell at some point, and overheating was a major issue. Human handlers had to step in constantly—swapping batteries, spraying robots with coolant, and in some cases, holding them up with what looked like pet leashes.
As Fern put it: “You wanna think of these robots more like running a remote control car through the race. But the robots don’t have wheels.”
Some robots, like Xuanfeng Xiaozi from the company Noetix, made it to the finish line after a string of increasingly absurd failures. Its head fell off mid-race and was taped back on by its team. By the end, it had a cooling pad strapped to its chest and a lopsided gait, but it still crossed the line, where its runner-up teammate had been waiting for ten minutes.
The robot race wasn’t just a flex of China’s engineering ambitions—it also highlighted just how far the technology still has to go. “I’ll be surprised if one of these companies makes it through without replacing the robot,” Fern predicted before the race. He wasn’t wrong.
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