With the modern era, technology has grown and broken limits we thought were impossible. One instance is in artificial intelligence. Currently, the US and China are competing on who can fully dominate this technological world, and China has taken a massive step forward.
On April 19, 21 humanoid robots joined around 12,000 humans at the Yizhuang half-marathon in Beijing. The race was 21.0975 kilometers (around 13 miles). Only six completed the race. One robot crashed into a railing, which caused the operator to fall. Another just fell at the starting line.
“The race garnered attention but also laid bare the challenges still facing the industry as China seeks to dominate technologies of the future,” NBC News explains. “The race came amid an intensifying tech rivalry between the U.S. and China, the world’s two biggest powers in artificial intelligence.”
“The largest, called “Tiangong Ultra” was 5 feet, 8 inches (180 centimeters) tall. The smallest, called “Little Giant” was just under two and a half feet (75 centimeters) tall. To join the race, the robots had to run on two feet, like humans,” News For Kids states. “To give each robot the best chance, each traveled with support workers and a van holding supply parts and even replacement robots. (There was a ten-minute time penalty for replacing a robot.)”
Many challenges occurred during the race. The first one was temperature. It was in the 50’s (Fahrenheit) in the morning and went up to the 70’s in the afternoon. The robots were constantly running, and this caused some of the robots to overheat. Other problems were technical issues. Some had design flaws that caused them to glitch. Others kept falling over due to balance issues.
“The winning robot was Tiangong Ultra, from the Beijing Innovation Center of Human Robotics, with a time of 2 hours and 40 minutes. The men’s winner of the race had a time of 1 hour and 2 minutes,” Reuters News explains. The knowledge that a robot could finish 40 minutes later than the average runner could finish a half marathon, around two hours, is impressive and shows the technological advancements that were overcome to make that possible.