Making industrial robots work "fast, accurate and steady"Beihang and a Beijing firm establish a joint lab
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On April 26, the "Joint Laboratory of Industrial Embodied Intelligence," jointly established by Beijing Xiaoyubot Technology Co., Ltd. and Beihang University (Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics), was unveiled in Beijing.
Voices from the launch
Lü Weifeng, vice president of Beihang University, said that this year Beihang has made "AI-led development" an important measure of its strategy to strengthen the university, integrating interdisciplinary strengths to establish an Embodied Intelligence Robotics Research Institute. The joint laboratory will focus on frontier breakthroughs, deepen the integration of industry and education, cultivate interdisciplinary top talent in embodied intelligence, and build a new benchmark for collaborative innovation across industry, academia and research.
"The difficulty of artificial intelligence lies in the deep integration of the data space and the physical space. Embodied intelligence is a must-win field in current global technology competition, and also a core strategic force for reshaping the underlying logic of national industrial manufacturing and developing new quality productive forces," said Zheng Zhiming, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He added that the joint laboratory provides an excellent opportunity for industry-academia-research-application, and that the pain points and bottlenecks of the laboratory, the university and industry should be combined.
Qiao Zhongliang, founder and CEO of Xiaoyubot, said that the embodied-intelligence industry is currently in an entrepreneurial boom, but lacks sufficiently good infrastructure. The whole industry needs enterprises capable of creating "super hit products" to step forward — like Tesla to electric vehicles and the iPhone to mobile phones — to drive the development of the industry chain. At present, the welding intelligent agents it has developed have been applied to several strategic partner clients and have entered mass production. "In the next ten years, fewer than 10 general-purpose embodied-intelligence companies worldwide will make it into the final round," Qiao said.
What the joint lab will tackle
It is understood that the laboratory aims to build a long-term university-enterprise cooperation mechanism, continuously carry out exchanges on world models and embodied-intelligence technology, and promote research cooperation in typical fields such as industrial embodied intelligence. Relying on the deep academic foundations of Beihang's School of Computer Science in embodied intelligence and trustworthy AI, and combining Xiaoyubot's real-world implementation capabilities in high-value industrial scenarios such as non-standard welding, the two sides will jointly build an integrated "industry-academia-research-application" innovation platform. Focusing on industrial-scenario needs, the laboratory will tackle a number of core technologies including spatial-perception native foundation models, fine-grained planning of long-horizon tasks, and high-fidelity simulation data generation, striving to make industrial robots truly work "accurately, fast and steadily," driving embodied intelligence to leap from frontier exploration to industrial-scale application and lead China's intelligent manufacturing.