China Market Insider China is Building Schools for Humanoids Nationwide

Related Vendors

FAULHABER Drive Systems

Taiwan Machine Tool & Accessory Builders' Association (TMBA)

SIMTOS (Seoul International Machine Tool Show)

China is building a national network of "robot schools" to train humanoid robots through human trainers. Millions of datasets for "embodied intelligence" are generated there.

These bipedal robots are still a bit dumb, but they are learning quickly. This can currently be well observed in Beijing, in the Shijingshan district in the far west of the Chinese capital. There stands China's largest training center for humanoids. Similar "robot schools" are currently being set up nationwide in several cities across the country by the Chinese government.

The co-operator here in Beijing, alongside the Shijingshan district, is the company Leju Robotics. According to China Daily, 200 human trainers work here with 100 humanoid robots, each 1.66 meters (5.45 feet) tall. The instructors wear headsets and control the robots with joysticks. The robots obediently perform the movements demanded by their instructors.

The curriculum includes tasks such as grasping a medicine bottle from a cabinet, sorting packages on a conveyor belt, or flipping through file folders.

"At first, the robot has no awareness, I have to control it manually. Once my movement generates data, it learns and can then perform the task on its own," says Fudi Luo, a former art teacher who now works full-time in Beijing as a trainer for humanoid robots, to a reporter.

A typical workday lasts eight hours with the same repetitive movements, she says. "The robot doesn't know what fatigue is, but I do," jokes the robot trainer.

The facility is part of a nationwide network that has been rapidly established over the past few months. These robot schools, officially called "Centers for Collecting Data for Embodied Intelligence," are already located not only in Beijing but also in Zigong in Sichuan Province, Liuzhou, Jiujiang, Wuxi, Wuhan, Shaoxing, and Zhengzhou. Additional large-scale training areas exist in Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Qingdao.

In Hangzhou, southwest of Shanghai, the robot school collaborates with the local robotics manufacturer Unitree, whose dancing humanoids have gained worldwide fame since performing on stage during the Chinese television Spring Festival gala.

This local center is called the "National Pilot Base for Embodied AI Applications," reports the Chinese news agency Xinhua. However, it is part of the same network that includes the other robot schools in Beijing and other provinces.

More than 130 robots are being trained here in over 30 different application scenarios. These range from waiter jobs in gastronomy to sales in retail, from stage performances to repairs on high-voltage pylons, and even deployments in orchards and on oil rigs, reports the official news agency Xinhua.

The manager Li Xingteng told the agency that they want "to build a platform that enables close collaboration with robotics companies across the country as well as with upstream and downstream companies in the industrial chain."

The goal is to pool various technological capabilities that are currently often spread across multiple manufacturers and geographically dispersed. Some companies are leaders in motion control, others in intelligent manipulators, says Li. Now efforts are being made to bring together the different parts of the value chain in such robot schools to accelerate the development of humanoid robots.

In Hangzhou alone, there are already more than 700 companies building robots or their components. Over 80% of all Chinese manufacturers of quadruped robots and more than half of all humanoid companies are registered in the city. Their revenue in 2025 was around 14 billion euros, writes Xinhua.

Far in western China, at the "Sichuan Humanoid Robot Multimodal Data Collection and Testing Center" in the city of Zigong, rows of Walker S2 robots from the manufacturer UB Tech Robotics are being trained. Ouyang Yuanbin, in his early 20s, puts on a VR headset and uses a Walker S2 to grab a package.

Pressure sensors in the fingertips register the slightest changes, and torque sensors in the joints detect every shift in balance. "The goal is to combine human teleoperation with autonomous data collection," Ouyang is quoted in the magazine "Qiushi."

This 6,000-square-meter facility was inaugurated on January 8 and has been operating at full capacity since March. With approximately 15,000 datasets daily, the target is to reach around three million per year.

The Communist Party and state leadership in Beijing have designated robotics, alongside artificial intelligence, biotech, and a few other future technologies, as a priority for the country's future development. They are now following these planning directives with concrete steps.

"Even if the baby is born intelligent, it cannot grow without real datasets," said Wang Feili, an industry analyst at UBS Securities China, recently in a discussion with journalists. Unlike autonomous driving, where billions of kilometers driven in China currently serve as a training basis, operational data for humanoid robots from complex environments is still extremely scarce, Wang says.

Simultaneously with the network of training centers, Beijing has introduced a national identification system for humanoid robots. Every humanoid manufactured in the country will henceforth receive a digital ID consisting of four number blocks, similar to a personal identification number.

This initiative is led by the Standardization Committee HEIS under the supervision of the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), as reported by the state broadcaster CCTV. More than 100 manufacturers have already been recorded, and over 28,000 robots have been properly registered.

*Henrik Bork is Managing Director at Asia Waypoint, a consulting agency specializing in China and based in Beijing. "China Market Insider" is a joint project of the Vogel Communications Group, Würzburg, and Jigong Vogel Media Advertising in Beijing.

Robotics

Humanoids Put to the Test