The National and Local Jointly-built Embodied Intelligent Robot Innovation Center was inaugurated, and a data factory with a million-level scale will be established | Frontline

Author | Huang Nan

Editor | Yuan Silai

HardcoreTech has learned that the Beijing Embodied Intelligent Robot Innovation Center has been officially upgraded to the "National and Local Jointly-built Embodied Intelligent Robot Innovation Center", and the unveiling ceremony was recently held in Beijing.

According to data such as the "Research Report on Embodied Intelligent Industrial Robot Products and Market", the scale of China's embodied intelligence market has reached 364.7 billion yuan in 2024 and is maintaining a rapid growth trend, with the potential to exceed one trillion yuan in 2026.

Among them, in the "Action Plan for the Innovative Development of the Robot Industry in Beijing (2023 - 2025)", it is clearly stipulated to cultivate 100 kinds of high-tech and high value-added robot products and 100 kinds of application scenarios with national promotion value. Through the establishment of special funds and the provision of tax incentives, the support for the embodied intelligent robot industry is increased.

The Beijing Embodied Intelligent Robot Innovation Center was established in 2023 and jointly funded and established by 10 industry-leading enterprises and institutions such as UBTECH, Jingcheng Electromechanical, Xiaomi Robotics, and Yizhuang Robotics. After this upgrade, the innovation center will be committed to solving common problems of various innovative entities, promoting the formulation of industry standards for embodied intelligence, improving the efficient allocation and integration level of resources in the innovation chain, industrial chain, and supply chain, further reducing the R & D and pilot-scale costs of enterprises, increasing the development and expansion of application scenarios, accelerating the maturation and iteration of innovative products during the research and trial process, and promoting the first landing and application of products on a global scale.

The Inauguration of the National and Local Jointly-built Embodied Intelligent Robot Innovation Center

In terms of R & D, the innovation center is developing a high-performance embodied intelligent agent "Kaiwu", which will achieve the decomposition and execution of complex long-range tasks with more than 50 steps based on more than 100 meta-skill combinations.

Based on the integration of multi-modal perception and interaction technologies, embodied intelligence can more accurately understand human intentions, thereby providing more intelligent and personalized services. However, in the actual training process, the difficulty of data collection is a major obstacle in the large-scale implementation of embodied intelligence. Diversified and high-quality data are beneficial for robots to improve their intelligence level.

To solve the problem of data shortage, the innovation center is currently also simultaneously building a national-level data collection and training field, integrating the production, collection, annotation, and storage of embodied intelligent data. The data set will reach the million-level, achieving high density, high quality, and high versatility, and will be open-sourced and open to the industry.

In the AI 2.0 wave, the technical path represented by embodied intelligence emphasizes generalization and pursues multi-scenario adaptation. Through the construction of data sets to accelerate the construction of the data factory of the innovation center, the innovation center, in collaboration with partners such as JD.com, ZTE, JUNPU Institute, Audi FAW, BAIC Investment, China Southern Power Grid, Beijing Chemical Industry Group, Donggang Ruihong, and UBTECH, has launched application cases in areas such as warehousing and logistics, factory sorting, automobile manufacturing, special work and inspection, dangerous scenarios, government services, and industry-university-research exchanges.

"Tiengong 1.0 LITE" Outdoor Walking

In terms of ecological construction, the innovation center, in collaboration with universities, research institutes such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, and the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, as well as upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain such as Aubo, Inspire, and Tashan Technology, conducts R & D cooperation on key common technologies such as dexterous hands, integrated joints, robot operating systems, and simulation development tool chains. At the same time, it has also compiled the first "Research Report on the Evaluation System of Humanoid Robots" in China, and established a testing system covering the entire chain including system modules, joints, mechanical arms, and the entire machine, providing a comprehensive testing and verification platform for embodied intelligent robots.

The official awarding of the National and Local Jointly-built Embodied Intelligent Robot Innovation Center marks that the embodied intelligent industry has become an important part of building and improving the national modern industrial system.

In April 2024, the innovation center released the general robot mother platform "Tiengong", achieving the anthropomorphic running of the world's first full-size pure electric drive humanoid robot. Its global leading whole-body collaborative control and generalized mobility ability enables it to move smoothly in various complex and generalized terrains such as slopes, stairs, grasslands, gravel, and sand. Subsequently, in August, "Tiengong" illuminated the emblem at the World Robot Conference, marking the first time that an embodied intelligent robot demonstrated its long-range task capability live at the opening ceremony of a world-class conference. Currently, "Tiengong" has completed two iterations and achieved breakthroughs in capabilities such as embodied perception, embodied interaction, and embodied behavior, with smooth hand-eye coordination and hand-eye interaction functions.

Tiengong 1.1 PRO

At the same time, the embodied intelligent service robot "Tianyi" officially released at the World Robot Conference is equipped with the embodied intelligent emotional large model jointly developed by the innovation center and Professor Wang Tao from the Emotional and Cognitive Intelligent Robot Laboratory of Peking University. It can accurately identify human emotions and conduct deeper intelligent interactions, and can be widely used in various scenarios such as reception, guided tours, Q & A, venue introductions, and dance performances.