Tencent Robotics X Lab

Tencent's robotics research lab, founded in 2018, now focused on an embodied-AI software platform.

Tencent set up this frontier robotics research unit in 2018, led by Tencent chief scientist Zhengyou Zhang, who previously worked at Microsoft Research and devised the widely used “Zhang's method” for camera calibration. At the time, China had almost no mature robot bodies to partner with, so the lab built its own hardware and software from scratch, developing the multimodal quadruped Max, the wheel-legged robot Ollie, and a household-robot prototype nicknamed “Xiaowu.” In early 2025 Tencent said explicitly that it wanted to be a partner to robot makers rather than sell its own hardware; that July, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, it launched the embodied-AI open platform Tairos, offering large models, developer tools, and data services in a modular way, already working with makers such as Unitree, AgiBot, Dobot, and LimX Dynamics. It later worked with the Hunyuan team to release the Hy-Embodied family of embodied models.

ExampleA robot maker can skip building its own “brain” and instead call the perception and planning models on the Tairos platform, connecting them to its own hardware for guided tours or delivery.

Also called

Tencent Robotics X

Related

Tencent Tairos Embodied AI Open Platform · Tencent HY-Embodied (Hunyuan Embodied) · Quadruped Robot · Wheel-legged Robot · Embodied Foundation Model · One Brain, Multiple Robots

Sources

极客公园：具身智能，腾讯「低调入局」 (Chinese)
华尔街见闻：对话腾讯首席科学家张正友 (Chinese)

As of

2026-07