China is making an effort to develop embodied intelligence by enhancing robots' ability to learn and understand, as learned at the Global Developer Pioneers Summit (GDPS) held in Shanghai on Saturday.
The industrial chain of embodied intelligence in China is accelerating its development as the country continues to make breakthroughs in key technologies, becoming an important force in deepening the integration of artificial intelligence and the real economy, according to industry researchers.
"To move from imitation to reasoning, we should integrate reasoning, planning, and control into a closed-loop framework. Embodied data has very high collection costs, and we need to explore new data collection technologies to create planable and large-scale data factories," said Yao Qizhi, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a Turing Award winner, in a speech at the summit.
After establishing foundational capabilities, the next phase will see complex task execution and industrial ecosystem coordination become critical, said Yao, noting that this entails evolving intelligent agents from performing isolated actions to mastering full-body coordination of complex skills.
Meanwhile, industry players need to develop unified standards and evaluation systems to promote open-source technology, result reproducibility, and large-scale deployment, said Yao.
"It is necessary to move from fragmented assessments to unified evaluations, establish open benchmarks and security norms, encourage open-source reproduction, and leverage challenge competitions to make excellent algorithms reusable, verifiable, and industrializable," said Yao.
The summit brought together global AI developers, corporate representatives, and research institutions, featuring multiple technical forums, open-source project launches, and hands-on activities.
During the opening ceremony of the summit, the Shanghai Humanoid Robot Pilotscale Experiment Alliance was officially established, aiming to accelerate the testing and industrialization of humanoid robots and further strengthen the foundation of the industrial ecosystem.
China to further develop embodied intelligence with focus on robots' learning ability
