MORE:Just Plain Fun | Robots | Strange + Wonderful | Technology | fun | japan | marathon | race | robovie | running
Robovie-PC Wins First Robot Marathon (At a Very Slow Pace)
March 1st, 2011
Ah, marathons. It seems that robots are now taking up the task of running them for us. The winner of the first robot marathon is a small robot called Robovie-PC.
Yep, it was a real marathon, not a mini-marathon, and definitely not this. There were five robots running a 330-foot track for the Vstone Robot Marathon [JP]. They had to run this over 400 times to complete a full marathon. The race was a full 26.2 miles long, but the guys over at PlasticPals point out that in robot scale (1/4.5 scale), they would have actually run closer to 118 miles in human scale.
The mini humanoid Robovie-PC stands about 16 inches tall and weighs 53 pounds. It has a total of 20 joints. Robovie-PC beat his closest opponent by just a second. It took him 55 hours to complete the marathon. His average speed was less than 0.5 mph. I guess there’s not danger of robots winning any real marathons soon.
[via Yahoo!News [JP] via PlasticPals]
|
