Do you remember the old adverts that pitted the Duracell bunny against other batteries at massive distances? Well, Panasonic is actually doing this now. They’ve designed robots, and entered them into a rather large triathlon taking place in Hawaii next month, in which homo sapiens will compete.

Panasonic will be using three variants of their tiny robot, Evolta, and a set of three rechargeable AA-batteries to complete a triathlon.

Panasonic haven’t claimed that Evolta will beat any of its human competitors, what with an projected race time of one week, or 168 hours, achieved by recharging the set of batteries shared by the three robots as many times as necessary during the race.

The specifics of the race are as such: a four kilometre swim, a 180 kilometre bike ride and a 42 kilometre marathon, totalling some 225 kilometres.

The little guys competing in the cycling and running aspects of the triathlon are 23 and 25 centimetres high, while the swimming robot is 51 centimetres long.

So far, different variations of Evolta have done some pretty incredible things. They’ve scaled the Grand Canyon, tricycled in the Le Mans 24 hour race, and walked 500 kilometres from Tokyo to the ancient city of Kyoto, in western Japan.

Our very best, little guys.

[Source: AFP via Yahoo]