A 90-cm robot built by a smartphone company outran Jacob Kiplimo this morning in Beijing. Honor — yes, the Huawei spin-off — sent its Lightning humanoid to the second E-Town half marathon and finished in 50 minutes 26 seconds on full autonomous navigation. Kiplimo’s human world record from last month: 57:20.
Honor took the whole podium, all three units self-driving. A separately entered remote-piloted Lightning crossed first at 48:19, but didn’t count for the autonomous division.
What the hardware actually is
A bipedal humanoid, 90 to 95 cm tall — short on purpose. Honor copied leg-to-body ratios from elite distance runners. The interesting part is thermals: most humanoid teams underestimate what 21 km does to actuators, so Honor reused the liquid-cooling stack from its smartphones to keep them from throttling mid-race. Development took roughly one year.
Why this race matters
112 teams ran, including squads from Germany, France and Brazil. Last year’s robot winner needed 2 hours 40 minutes. This year’s autonomous champion needed 50. A 3x speedup in 12 months, and the autonomous robot time is now under the human world record on flat road.
A phone brand just put a humanoid on a real road-race podium.
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