Last week, we reported about Japanese robot maker Vstone’s plan to start the world’s first full marathon [JP] for humanoids, and that race started today at 10am Japanese time. It will take the 5 participants until Sunday to complete the full marathon (42.195km) in Osaka, and thanks to Ustream, you can see them running live until the very end.
Vstone says the main target of the event (apart from the obvious PR effect) is to prove how high quality his company’s robots are. All participants must run the whole marathon non-stop.
Vstone also said it wants to bring the idea to other markets at some point in the future.
Here’s the Ustream live video (broadcast from the perspective of one of the participating robots, other options can be found here):
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/viewer.swf
Video clips at Ustream