A robot made by the Chinese company AgiBot completed a 100-kilometer, cross-province walk earlier this month. This makes it the Guinness World Record holder for the “longest journey walked by a humanoid robot.”
The AgiBot A2 completed a 100km. trek from Suzhou’s Jinji Lake in East China’s Jiangsu Province to Shanghai’s Bund. A Guinness World Record adjudicator confirmed that the robot had walked 106.286km over three days.
The AgiBot only has a max standing battery life of three hours, but it utilizes a new hot-swap battery system, which allows it to keep operating continuously during the challenge by changing batteries mid-journey.
It passed through cities, scenic areas, and highways, encountering a mix of surfaces and areas with limited nighttime lighting. The robot is said to have adhered to traffic rules throughout the route to the Bund.
Despite walking more than 100km, the robot remained in good condition, with only some wear observed on the rubber layer of its foot soles.
Once it reached the North Bund, it interacted with some reporters, calling the journey “a memorable experience in my machine life,” and joking that it would “need a new pair of shoes.”
Wang Chuang, partner and senior vice president of AgiBot, said that the walk was meant to demonstrate the reliability and stability of humanoid robot technology.
He noted that walking is only one basic capability, saying that the robot already supports multilingual interaction, facial recognition and memory, autonomous guiding, and delivery tasks.
Rapid development of robot travel capabilities
Only six months ago, the first robot vs. human marathon was held in Beijing, China, where the robots lost by over an hour and a half.
The change from the robot marathon, where humans significantly beat the robots, to the 100km robot walk highlights how quickly the Chinese robotics industry is advancing.
Chuang commented that “walking from Suzhou to Shanghai is difficult for many people to do in one go, yet the robot completed it,” saying that the outcome shows advances in durability, balance control, and overall endurance.
AgiBot said that the A2 that completed the challenge is the same one that comes off the assembly line, with no modifications.