A humanoid robot runs among human participants during a half marathon event in Beijing, captured by staff photographer Han Guan Ng. The image shows the alignment of runners, robots and event staging in a single frame.

A premapped course, a crew of handlers and a world-beating time: here’s what this Beijing half marathon reveals about how far humanoid robots have come—and how far they haven’t

BEIJING — It was not even close as a bright red Chinese humanoid named “Lightning” lived up to its name in a half-marathon pitting humans against robots, smoking its competition on Sunday

There has been a lot of talk about a fully autonomous robot that broke a human world record during a half marathon in China. That is mostly true. It is

A self-navigating robot called Lightning, developed by Chinese electronics company Honor, won the 13.1-mile race. Its results and others mark significant advancements since last year's inaugural event,

As data centers scale and autonomous systems become more common, Micropolis Robotics’ Alexander Rugaev unpacks an operational boundary: machines can observe, but not decide. Robots are