Tiangong Ultra

Tiangong Ultra is the running-tuned member of the Tiangong family built by the Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics (X-Humanoid). On 19 April 2025 it won the world's first half marathon for humanoid robots, held alongside the Beijing Yizhuang half marathon in Nanhaizi Park: 20 robot teams and 12,000 human runners started together, and Tiangong Ultra covered the full 21.0975 km in 2 hours 40 minutes 42 seconds. That is a distance record for legged machines by a wide margin. The centre's own benchmark for comparison was Cassie, the ostrich-like biped with no upper body, which in 2021 ran 5 km in about 53 minutes. Tiangong Ultra averaged 7–8 km/h over the course; its top speed had been raised from the 6 km/h of the first Tiangong to a peak of 12 km/h. The robot is bigger than the original: about 180 cm and about 55 kg. Scaling a humanoid up is not free — the centre points out that a higher centre of mass forces more joint torque, higher impact loads and harder dynamic balance. What made the distance possible was mostly thermal and structural work: joint heat conduction and whole-machine thermal simulation to keep the actuators at equilibrium over nearly three hours, plus a rigid-flexible leg design with buffering structures so repeated foot strikes did not fatigue the frame. Battery hot-swapping kept it powered on the move. It also ran without a pilot. Instead of the gamepad control common in robot demonstrations, Tiangong Ultra used ultra-wideband wireless following: it tracked a lead unit, computed its own position from onboard multimodal sensors and adjusted heading and speed in real time. Motion control came from the family's predictive reinforcement imitation learning based on state memory, trained with added disturbances — turns, slopes, rough surfaces — and the whole machine ran on the centre's Huisi Kaiwu embodied-intelligence platform. Tiangong Ultra was never a catalogue product; it is a demonstrator, and the centre showed Tiangong 2.0 in the post-race exhibition area the same day.

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