One robot fell flat about 200 feet from the starting line, then got up and ran on with its upper body held together by packing tape. That was the mood in Beijing on April 19, 2026, at the second E-Town humanoid robot half-marathon, where the winner still managed to beat the human world record.
The winner was a bipedal robot built by Shenzhen Honor Smart Technology Development Co., Ltd. Macao News named it “Flash”; People’s Daily called the winning robot “Lightning” and credited the Qitian Dasheng Team. Either way, it covered the 21-kilometre course in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, navigating on its own at about 25 km/h. The men’s human record stands at 57 minutes and 20 seconds, set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo at the Lisbon Half Marathon the month before. The robot beat it by nearly seven minutes.
Who actually crossed first
The scoring has a twist. A remote-controlled Honor robot physically reached the line first, in 48 minutes and 19 seconds. But the rules multiply the finishing times of remote-controlled machines by 1.2, a handicap meant to push teams toward autonomous navigation, so the autonomous runner took the title. Two more autonomous Honor robots finished in about 51 and 53 minutes.
Honor test development engineer Du Xiaodi said the design was modelled on elite human athletes, with legs roughly 95 cm long and a liquid-cooling system largely developed in-house. Team captain Ma Huaze said the hardest part was having the courage to try big upgrades on a stage this public.
A year of change
The gap from 2025 is huge. Last year Tiangong Ultra won in 2 hours, 40 minutes and 42 seconds, and only six of the 20 competing teams finished. This time more than 100 teams entered, including some from Germany, France and Brazil, and at least four robots went under an hour. People’s Daily reported that nearly 40 percent of teams achieved autonomous navigation.
Teams pointed to practical fixes. Battery swaps that once took minutes and a system reboot now take under 10 seconds. Combining liquid and air cooling brought joint temperatures down from 70-80 degrees Celsius to around 60. Xu Zhiyuan, of the Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics, said tens of thousands of virtual robots logged a combined 27,300 hours of running in simulation.
Not everything went smoothly. Another robot crossed the finish line, veered off and tumbled into a bush. Flash itself hit a railing near the end, was helped up and finished. A different robot worked the course as a traffic officer, directing people with arm gestures and voice commands.
Humans ran the same route in separate lanes. Zhao Haijie won the men’s race in 1:07:47 and Wang Qiaoxia the women’s in 1:18:06.
Spectator Sun Zhigang, back with his son after last year’s race, said it was the first time robots had surpassed humans, something he never imagined. A young spectator said she was enthusiastic but “a little worried” about jobs. Investment in robotics and embodied AI in China reached 73.5 billion yuan ($10.8 billion) in 2025, according to Macao News.
Sources
- Shenzhen’s Honor robot smashes the human world record at the Beijing half-marathon
- China-developed humanoid robot breaks half-marathon record in Beijing – People's Daily Online
