Chinese Robotics Company Achieves Guinness World Records Title for Longest Journey Walked by a Humanoid Robot
In a groundbreaking demonstration of humanoid robot endurance and reliability, AgiBot’s A2 humanoid robot has officially entered the Guinness World Records after completing a 106.286-kilometer (66.04-mile) trek from Suzhou to Shanghai over three continuous days. The journey, completed between November 10-13, 2025, represents the longest distance ever walked by a humanoid robot, showcasing technological maturity that signals the industry’s rapid transition from laboratory demonstrations to real-world operational capability.
The silver and black A2 robot began its historic journey from Jinji Lake in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, on the evening of November 10, traversing urban roads, national highways, bridges, and complex terrain before arriving at Shanghai’s iconic waterfront Bund on November 13. The robot maintained continuous operation without powering down, navigating day-night cycles, low light conditions, varied surfaces, traffic patterns, and unpredictable obstacles, all while adhering to traffic regulations alongside human pedestrians and vehicles.
AgiBot’s achievement marks a watershed moment for the humanoid robotics industry, demonstrating that current-generation robots possess the endurance, stability, and autonomous navigation capabilities required for sustained real-world deployment rather than brief controlled demonstrations. As the global humanoid robot market surges toward $15.26 billion by 2030, this record validates that the technology has progressed beyond research curiosities to practical machines ready for commercial applications demanding multi-day continuous operation.
The Record-Setting Journey: 66 Miles of Urban Navigation
Route Complexity and Environmental Challenges
The A2’s route from Suzhou to Shanghai tested every aspect of modern humanoid robotics capabilities. The robot navigated diverse surfaces including smooth asphalt roads, tiled pavements with varying friction, bridge surfaces with expansion joints, tactile paving designed for visually impaired pedestrians, and sloped surfaces requiring dynamic balance adjustments. This variety forced the robot’s control systems to continuously adapt to changing terrain conditions rather than optimizing for a single surface type.
Environmental conditions presented equally significant challenges. The journey included day-night alternation requiring the robot to navigate in varying light conditions, from bright midday sun to near-darkness at night. Low-light environments tested the robot’s perception systems, which rely on cameras and sensors that perform differently under varying illumination. Urban navigation meant sharing space with cyclists, scooters, pedestrians, and vehicles, requiring sophisticated obstacle avoidance and social navigation behaviors.
Wang Chuang, AgiBot’s partner and senior vice president, emphasized the difficulty of the challenge in statements to Chinese media. He noted that walking from Suzhou to Shanghai proves difficult for many humans to accomplish in one continuous effort, making the robot’s achievement particularly impressive. The journey equivalent to running approximately 2.5 full marathons back-to-back without rest, a feat that would exhaust most human athletes.
Hot-Swappable Battery Technology: The Key Enabler
The technological breakthrough enabling the A2’s record-setting walk was AgiBot’s hot-swappable battery system that allowed continuous operation despite limited battery capacity. Rather than requiring hours of downtime for recharging, the A2 could replace depleted batteries while continuing to operate, maintaining uninterrupted progress throughout the three day journey.
This battery-swapping capability represents one of the most critical innovations for practical humanoid deployment. Current humanoid robots typically operate for 1-4 hours on single battery charges, with high-energy activities like continuous walking draining power even faster. Without hot-swapping capability, the A2 would have required dozens of hours of charging time, extending the journey by days and fundamentally changing the nature of the achievement.
The approach mirrors innovations in electric vehicle infrastructure, where battery-swapping stations enable rapid vehicle turnaround compared to lengthy charging sessions. UBTech’s Walker S2 recently demonstrated autonomous battery swapping, where robots independently navigate to charging stations and replace their own batteries without human intervention. AgiBot’s implementation likely required human assistance for battery changes, but the seamless power continuation proved the viability of extended-duration robot operations.
AgiBot A2: Technical Specifications and Capabilities
Physical Design and Mobility
The AgiBot A2 stands 175 centimeters (5 feet 9 inches) tall and weighs 55 kilograms (121 pounds), matching typical adult human proportions and weight. This humanoid scale proves crucial for the robot’s intended commercial applications in customer service, retail guidance, and public interaction where human-scale robots create more comfortable interactions than oversized industrial machines or undersized desktop robots.
The robot features 49 degrees of freedom enabling naturalistic movement patterns that approximate human kinematics. This articulation allows the A2 to navigate environments designed for humans climbing curbs, navigating doorways, and maneuvering through crowded spaces, without requiring specialized accommodations. Walking speed reaches up to 7 kilometers per hour (4.3 miles per hour), faster than typical human walking pace and comparable to a brisk jog.
AI-Powered Perception and Navigation
The A2’s navigation capabilities rely on sophisticated sensor fusion combining RGBD cameras providing depth information alongside color images, LiDAR sensors creating 3D environmental maps, dual GPS modules for position tracking, and infrared depth cameras for low-light operation. This multi-sensor approach provides redundancy, if one sensor type fails or performs poorly under certain conditions, others compensate.
For the world record attempt, AgiBot equipped the A2 with dual GPS modules beyond its standard sensor suite, providing precise location tracking throughout the journey. Combined with built-in LiDAR and infrared cameras, this sensor array gave the robot comprehensive environmental awareness under all lighting conditions and weather scenarios encountered during the three-day trek.
The robot’s AI systems process this sensor data in real-time, recognizing obstacles, predicting pedestrian movements, planning navigation paths, and adjusting walking gait for terrain. Edge computing capabilities allow the A2 to run powerful AI models directly on-board without requiring cloud connectivity for decision-making, crucial for maintaining operation in areas with poor network coverage.
Manipulation and Interaction Capabilities
Beyond locomotion, the A2 features dexterous manipulation capabilities including fine motor skills sufficient for tasks like threading needles, multilingual conversation powered by large language models, facial recognition with 96% accuracy and memory of recognized individuals, voice command understanding and natural response generation, and autonomous task execution for delivery, guidance, and customer service functions.
These capabilities position the A2 for the commercial applications AgiBot targets. The robot serves as marketing ambassador, customer service agent, exhibition hall presenter, supermarket guide, front desk receptionist, and business inquiry assistant. The world record walk demonstrated the locomotion and endurance foundations, while the AI and manipulation capabilities provide the interactive functionality needed for revenue-generating deployments.
The Founder: From Viral Tech Influencer to Robotics Entrepreneur
Peng Zhihui’s Journey to National Prominence
AgiBot’s success story is inseparable from its co-founder and CTO Peng Zhihui, whose journey from viral tech creator to nationally recognized robotics entrepreneur exemplifies China’s ecosystem for supporting ambitious technology ventures. Born in 1993, Peng gained early attention through creative DIY projects showcased on Bilibili, China’s equivalent to YouTube, including self-balancing robots, a miniature television, a robotic arm capable of stitching grape skins, and a self-driving bicycle.
These viral demonstrations established Peng’s reputation as an innovative maker with exceptional engineering skills, attracting millions of views and building a substantial online following. After graduating from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China with a master’s degree in information technology in 2018, Peng joined OPPO’s AI Lab before being recruited into Huawei’s highly selective Genius Youth program in 2020.
At Huawei, Peng worked on AI projects in the computing division, earning a top-tier annual salary reportedly reaching 2 million yuan (approximately $280,000). His Iron Man-inspired robotic arm creation became a viral sensation on Chinese social media, further cementing his status as a rising star in China’s tech community. However, in late 2022, Peng announced his departure from Huawei to pursue his dream of building humanoid robots.
Founding AgiBot and Rapid Growth
Peng co-founded AgiBot (officially registered as Zhiyuan Robotics) in February 2023 with several partners, though he serves as the public face representing the company at major events. The name AgiBot combines AGI (artificial general intelligence) with Bot (robot), while Zhiyuan roughly translates to “intelligent origin,” reflecting the company’s ambition to create robots with general-purpose intelligence.
The startup quickly attracted major investment from prominent backers including HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), Hillhouse Investment, BYD (the electric vehicle giant), Tencent, Warburg Pincus, CDH Investments, Lanchi Ventures, and various government-backed funds. Reports suggest AgiBot achieved a 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) valuation just three months after launch, becoming an instant unicorn and one of China’s most prominent robotics startups alongside Unitree Robotics and UBTech Robotics.
Recent funding rounds reportedly targeted valuations approaching 15 billion yuan ($2.1 billion), reflecting investor confidence in AgiBot’s technology and market positioning. The company has also secured high-profile endorsements, including a demonstration for Chinese President Xi Jinping in April 2025, where the president jokingly inquired whether robots would one day play for China’s national football team. In April 2025, Peng attended a symposium with Premier Li Qiang, becoming the youngest of seven industry leaders invited to the meeting focused on China’s economic resilience and technology innovation.
Production Scale and Commercial Deployment
Mass Production Milestones
AgiBot has moved aggressively from prototype development to commercial production, achieving manufacturing milestones that few humanoid robotics companies worldwide have reached. By December 2024, the company had produced 962 units, reaching the 1,000-unit milestone by January 2025. These numbers include both bipedal humanoids and wheeled robots across AgiBot’s product lines.
Wang Chuang emphasized that the A2 robot used for the world record attempt was a standard mass-produced commercial unit with no customized modifications, identical to robots delivered to clients. This detail proves crucial, the record wasn’t achieved with a specially-tuned prototype but with production hardware that customers receive, validating the reliability and capability of AgiBot’s commercial products.
For 2025, AgiBot executives have stated ambitious production targets of 3,000 to 5,000 robots, aiming to match projected output for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid. The company operates manufacturing facilities in Shanghai’s Lingang New Area, a government-designated hub for advanced manufacturing and technology innovation. A new plant is reportedly planned to boost capacity for meeting growing demand.
Commercial Applications and Client Deployments
AgiBot has secured over 1,000 commercial unit shipments in 2025, placing it among global leaders in full-size humanoid deployment. The company’s highest-profile collaboration involves PepsiCo, which appointed a customized A2 humanoid named “Fizzbot” as its first robotic brand ambassador. The robot debuted in a presentation featuring David Beckham, and Pepsi-branded AgiBot humanoids serve soft drinks to guests at major events like the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.
Beyond celebrity endorsements, AgiBot robots operate in practical commercial environments including retail stores providing customer guidance, manufacturing facilities for inspection tasks, exhibition halls as interactive presenters, hotels performing concierge services, and office buildings for delivery and logistics support. The robots’ multilingual capabilities, facial recognition, and natural conversation abilities make them particularly suited for customer-facing applications where human-robot interaction quality determines success.
The company describes its vision as making robots transition from task-specific tools to autonomous entities with general intelligence. While current deployments focus on structured, repeatable tasks, AgiBot’s long-term roadmap envisions robots capable of learning new skills through observation, adapting to novel situations without explicit programming, and handling the complexity and variability of real-world environments.
Industry Context: China’s Humanoid Robot Leadership Push
Government Support and Strategic Priorities
AgiBot’s achievements occur within a broader context of aggressive Chinese government support for robotics development. Beijing has positioned humanoid robots as a strategic technology priority, with national policy goals targeting production at scale by 2025 and global market leadership by 2027. This government backing includes massive subsidies, preferential procurement policies, streamlined regulatory approval for robot deployments, and inclusion of robotics in high-level economic planning initiatives.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently formalized China’s national humanoid robotics committee, with AgiBot’s Peng Zhihui appointed as vice-director alongside founders from Unitree Robotics (Wang Xingxing) and leadership from Shanghai’s Humanoid Robotics Innovation Centre. This committee establishes unified standards for safety, hardware interfaces, and data formats, regulatory baselines critical as robots transition from factories into public spaces.
Beijing hosted the World Humanoid Robot Games in August 2025, featuring over 500 robots from 16 countries competing in 26 different sporting events ranging from track and field to boxing to soccer. These competitions serve dual purposes: advancing robot capabilities through demanding real-world challenges and demonstrating China’s technological progress on the international stage. AgiBot robots participated in these games, though they didn’t dominate medal counts the way Unitree’s H1 robots swept track events.
Competitive Landscape and Market Positioning
The Chinese humanoid robotics market features intense competition among well-funded startups and established technology companies. Unitree Robotics in Hangzhou has achieved global attention with aggressive pricing strategies, offering humanoids starting at $5,900 and planning a $7 billion IPO. UBTech Robotics in Shenzhen recently secured a $37 million contract to deploy Walker S2 humanoids at China-Vietnam border crossings. XPeng Motors unveiled its IRON humanoid at its 2025 Tech Day, with the electric vehicle giant bringing automotive manufacturing expertise to robot production.
AgiBot differentiates through its focus on edge AI computing, allowing robots to operate without constant cloud connectivity, rapid iteration enabled by founder Peng Zhihui’s viral prototyping approach attracting talent and visibility, strategic partnerships with major brands like PepsiCo providing commercial validation, and government recognition positioning the company as a national champion in strategic technology.
Industry analysts predict China could have 302.3 million humanoid robots in use by 2050, well ahead of U.S. projections of 77.7 million, with Chinese companies expected to dominate global production due to vertical integration advantages, government support, massive domestic market, and willingness to deploy robots at scale before perfecting every capability.
Technical Significance: What the Record Reveals About Robot Maturity
Endurance as a Critical Deployment Barrier
The 66-mile walk addresses one of the most fundamental barriers preventing widespread humanoid deployment: operational endurance. Current humanoid robots face severe limitations in battery life, with most operating 1-4 hours on single charges. This constraint relegates robots to applications with frequent charging opportunities or short operating windows, dramatically limiting commercial viability.
AgiBot’s demonstration that a production humanoid can operate continuously for three days through battery swapping proves that endurance limitations stem from energy storage rather than mechanical durability or control system stability. The robot’s mechanical components, sensors, actuators, and AI systems maintained reliable function throughout 100+ kilometers of walking, encountering no catastrophic failures that required extensive repairs or recalibration.
Upon completion, AgiBot reported the robot remained in good condition with wear observed only on the rubber layer of foot soles, normal consumable wear analogous to shoe sole degradation in humans. This minimal deterioration after three days of continuous operation demonstrates mechanical robustness sufficient for demanding real-world applications where robots operate for weeks or months between maintenance cycles.
Environmental Adaptability and Resilience
The journey’s environmental variety tested adaptability crucial for practical deployment. Robots that only function in controlled factory environments with flat floors, consistent lighting, and minimal obstacles provide limited value compared to machines capable of navigating real-world complexity. The A2’s successful navigation through urban areas, highways, bridges, day-night cycles, and varied surfaces demonstrates environmental adaptability approaching human capability.
Liu Dingding, a veteran Chinese industrial expert, marked this achievement as a milestone in improving robot reliability, endurance, motion control, and environmental adaptability. He predicted that robots could match or even surpass humans in certain physical tasks in the near future. While this prediction may be optimistic given current gaps between robot and human athletic performance, the trajectory toward parity becomes increasingly plausible with each successive breakthrough.
Real-World Navigation and Social Awareness
Perhaps most impressively, the A2 navigated alongside human traffic while following traffic regulations throughout the journey. This social navigation, understanding implicit rules, yielding appropriately to pedestrians and vehicles, avoiding collisions while maintaining progress, represents sophisticated AI behavior beyond simple obstacle avoidance. The robot demonstrated awareness of social norms and conventions that govern human movement in shared spaces.
This capability proves essential for robots operating in human environments. A warehouse robot working in a dedicated facility can optimize purely for efficiency. A humanoid robot sharing sidewalks, crosswalks, and public spaces with humans must balance efficiency with social appropriateness, safety, and human comfort. The A2’s successful three-day journey through busy Chinese cities demonstrates this social intelligence at a level necessary for practical deployment.
Future Implications: What Comes After the Record
Commercialization Pathway for Extended-Duration Applications
The world record validates AgiBot’s technology for applications requiring multi-hour or multi-day continuous operation. Potential use cases include 24-hour security patrols in facilities, multi-shift warehouse operations without downtime, extended customer service coverage at transportation hubs, outdoor event management and crowd guidance, and infrastructure inspection requiring travel between distant locations.
AgiBot’s hot-swappable battery approach provides more flexible deployment model than robots requiring fixed charging stations. Mobile battery swapping enables robots to operate in environments without electrical infrastructure, support operations that exceed single-charge duration regardless of battery capacity, and continue functioning during power outages by using charged batteries as mobile power sources.
However, questions remain about operational costs and practicality. How frequently did the A2 require battery swaps during the 66-mile walk? How long did each swap take? Did human technicians need specialized training? These details determine whether battery-swapping robots offer compelling economic advantages over robots with longer battery life but more limited capabilities.
Competition Heating Up
AgiBot’s world record will likely trigger competitive responses from rival Chinese companies and international competitors. Unitree could attempt longer walks with its H1 or upcoming models, potentially incorporating autonomous battery swapping demonstrated in the Walker S2. Figure AI, Agility Robotics, and other Western companies may pursue endurance records to demonstrate their technology’s maturity and reliability.
These competitive dynamics benefit the entire industry by driving rapid innovation, establishing performance benchmarks, generating public interest and investment, and accelerating the timeline toward practical commercial deployments. Just as robot sports competitions drive innovation through structured challenges, endurance records push companies to solve practical engineering problems required for real-world deployment.
Pathway to Household Robots
For consumer applications, extended endurance proves critical. Household robots must operate throughout the day performing various tasks without requiring constant human attention for recharging. A robot that needs charging every 2 hours provides limited utility compared to machines that work full 8-12 hour days with minimal maintenance.
AgiBot aims for household adoption within approximately five years, acknowledging that achieving widespread consumer adoption requires significant cost reductions targeting prices near 50,000 yuan ($6,900) per unit. Current humanoid pricing ranges from $5,900 for basic models to $90,000+ for advanced platforms, with most commercial humanoids priced $16,000-$30,000. Reaching sub-$7,000 consumer pricing while maintaining the capabilities demonstrated in the world record walk represents an enormous challenge requiring continued advances in manufacturing scale, component costs, and design optimization.
Walking Into the Future
AgiBot’s world record, 106.286 kilometers walked continuously over three days, represents far more than a publicity stunt or Guinness World Records novelty. It marks a genuine technological milestone demonstrating that current-generation humanoid robots possess the endurance, reliability, environmental adaptability, and autonomous navigation capabilities required for demanding real-world applications.
The achievement validates China’s massive investment in humanoid robotics and positions AgiBot alongside Unitree and UBTech as one of the nation’s leading robotics companies. Founder Peng Zhihui’s journey from viral tech creator to nationally recognized entrepreneur exemplifies China’s ecosystem supporting ambitious technology ventures through government backing, venture capital, and public-private partnerships.
As the robot arrived at Shanghai’s Bund after its historic walk, it briefly interacted with reporters, calling the journey a “memorable experience” in its “machine life” and joking that it might now “need a new pair of shoes.” This humanized presentation, giving the robot a voice, personality, and relatable reactions, reflects AgiBot’s vision for robots that interact naturally with humans rather than remaining distant mechanical tools.
The distance between a 66-mile demonstration walk and robots seamlessly integrated into daily human life remains substantial. Challenges around cost, capability breadth, safety, and social acceptance all require continued development. However, each milestone like AgiBot’s world record narrows this gap, bringing the vision of ubiquitous helpful humanoid robots closer to reality.
Taking the Next Steps
For the humanoid robotics industry, the question is no longer whether robots can walk continuously for days, AgiBot proved they can. The questions now are: What commercial applications justify deploying such robots? How quickly can costs fall to enable widespread adoption? And when will the next record-breaking achievement demonstrate capabilities previously thought years away?
If current progress continues, those answers may arrive sooner than anyone expects. The robots aren’t just walking, they’re running toward a future where they work alongside humans as reliable, capable partners in countless applications from factories to homes to city streets.
The longest journey begins with a single step. AgiBot’s A2 just took 106.286 kilometers worth of them, and the robotics industry will never walk the same way again.
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