China's robot school gets down to business

HANGZHOU — At a "school" in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang province, "teachers" hold remote controls, sensors record every move, and "students" drill the same task again and again until they get it right.

Those "students" are actually robots. More than 140 of them are currently training at the National Pilot Base for Embodied AI Applications in over 40 workplace scenarios, including smart kitchens, warehouses, farms and a dimly lit mock mine tunnel.

Chinese robots have wowed audiences with backflips, boxing and dance routines. The real test now is whether they can perform everyday jobs reliably. A long-standing headache for the industry is that robots performing well in simulation often stumble when faced with the messiness of real-world settings.

To bridge that gap, this base, sitting between laboratory research and wider deployment, can provide shared settings where technologies can be tested, refined, and validated before full-scale rollout.

Inaugurated on May 16, the national-level facility dedicated to moving embodied artificial intelligence — machines that sense, move, and act in the physical world — from laboratories into daily use is also dubbed a "national vocational training ground" for robots. The plaque, in fact, arrived after the students. On May 16, when the base opened for its trial operation, nearly 40 embodied-AI companies and more than 10 universities and research institutes were already on site for development and training work.

The base runs a dual-track approach combining real-scenario training with high-fidelity virtual simulation. In physical scenarios, technicians teleoperate robots through tasks over and over, with every successful move recorded by sensors as "raw teaching material" for model training.

In a simulated smart kitchen, Hangzhou Big Data Cloud AI Technology has been teaching robots a full restaurant routine since last November: taking orders, fetching ingredients, stir-frying a dish in three to four minutes, then plating it and collecting used dishes.

Yang Jiandang, cofounder of the company, says developing a customized catering application from scratch could require several million yuan in research and development. Since the base already provides some of the underlying facilities and technical capabilities, his team can begin with a lower-cost feasibility test.

The cost matters. "In the past, developing a single application scenario could cost a company more than 10 million yuan ($1.5 million) in training data alone," says Zhang Haiwei, founder of the motion-capture firm Chingmu. "Now companies based here get one-stop access to the resources they need."

Logistics firm Transfar and robot maker Unitree jointly run a warehouse scenario where wheeled humanoid robots pick, scan, and carry goods of varying shapes. Elsewhere, smart forklifts stack cargo with positioning accuracy up to 1 mm, and harvesting robots pick ripe fruit around the clock.

What makes the "school" so attractive to these companies? Zhou Chen, DexRobot's CEO, likens their predicament to equipping a warhorse in a classic Chinese folk ballad. "You buy the saddle from one vendor, the harness from another, the reins from a third, but end up with a pile of parts and no idea how to assemble them. That's exactly why we need a platform, and this pilot base brings everything together.

"The base is like a library for robotics," he says. "You come here because everything you need is on the shelves."

The clustering pays off in speed. Chingmu and dexterous-hand developer DexRobot, located within the same building, have established a joint laboratory.

"The moment they launch a new product, we can put it to use. If something in yesterday's data needs to be re-collected, we respond the same day," says Zhang.

"Upstairs and downstairs are upstream and downstream. Our next-door neighbor is our partner," says Zhou, adding that the joint lab gives companies a low-stakes space to test the waters on a small scale. With so many firms clustered in one place, they can help make preliminary assessments and slash decision-making costs.

Li Xingteng, deputy general manager of Hangzhou Embodied Intelligence Pilot Base Technology, the base's operator, says the platform aims to turn companies' specialized strengths into integrated solutions by linking firms across the robotics chain.

Institutional support is expanding, too. In June, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission launched a 2026 initiative to promote real-scenario training and regular deployment of humanoid robots and other embodied-AI products. China's first local regulation on the industry also took effect in Hangzhou on May 1.

The base is one node in a wider push. Hangzhou is now home to more than 700 robotics-related companies, and its embodied-AI cluster generated an output of 106.8 billion yuan in 2025, official data showed.

Li says mature embodied-AI solutions trained at the base will eventually be deployed in experimental communities, where problems will be identified and addressed through real-world use.

XINHUA