[Photo via Beijing E-Town]

The 2026 Beijing E-Town Half-Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half-Marathon was held today, with over 100 teams competing on the same course. The robot "Shandian" (闪电) from Team Monkey King (齐天大圣队) clocked a time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds and was declared the winner.

[Photo via Beijing E-Town]

The 21.0975-kilometers race began at Kechuang 17th Street and finished at Nanhaizi Park, passing several landmarks of the E-Town along the way, including the Robot World, Pawlonia Boulevard (泡桐大道) and BOE's headquarters. The course was designed to provide a competitive challenge while testing the robots' capabilities, incorporating more than ten types of terrain, including flat roads, slopes, curves and narrow sections, to increase the complexity. These features ensured a competition-level test of robots' performances in a real-world setting, offering a chance for technology validation and industrial showcasing.

[Photo via Beijing E-Town]

The contestants were divided into two categories: fully autonomous robots and remotely controlled ones. While the two groups competed on the same ranking, they were timed separately. Specifically, for a remotely controlled robot, its actual finishing time was multiplied by a weighting coefficient of 1.2, meaning that a finishing time of 60 minutes would be recorded as 72 minutes, whereas a fully autonomous robot using the same time could achieve a higher ranking. Robots were released in a phased manner, with one robot starting the race every 30 seconds. Each robot was accompanied by a judge in a golf cart who recorded rule violations, battery swaps and penalty times in a real-time manner. The timing system adopted RFID (radio frequency identification) chips, with pressure-sensitive mats installed at the starting line, checkpoints, finishing line, aid stations, and exit points, thereby ensuring the fully automatic recording of all necessary data.

(Source: qianlong.com)