HIGH on the vertical steel wall of a chemical tank, a silver figure walks with ease, unencumbered by safety harnesses. With one arm, it wields a welding torch with precision; with the other, it meticulously scans for flaws.

This is not a scene from a science fiction film, but a real-world application of China’s embodied artificial intelligence (AI) for high-risk industrial tasks.

The robot, developed by a tech company in Zhejiang Province, is designed to replace human workers in some of the most dangerous environments, from towering chemical plants to the hulls of massive ships.

“Previously, workers would hang in mid-air for hours, battered by wind and sun, choking on dust,” said Xu Huayang, founder and CEO of the producer RobotPlusPlus. “Now, an operator in a cool control room, wearing VR glasses, simply moves the wrist, and the robot on the wall mirrors the action with millisecond-level response.”

Weighing 90 kilograms, the robot’s lower half is a wheeled, magnetically adhered chassis that can move stably even while carrying the weight of an adult. Its upper body features two humanoid arms with 15 degrees of freedom, allowing it to switch seamlessly between tasks such as welding, flaw detection, rust removal and spraying by simply changing its end-effectors.

The key to its versatility is what Xu calls the “brain” — a large-scale AI model specifically trained for special operations. It is reportedly China’s most data-rich model of its kind, having accumulated over 100,000 hours of operational time and traveled a distance equivalent to more than half the Earth’s circumference.

A domestically developed subsea cable detection robot has also recently been deployed. Acting as an underwater “scout,” it can autonomously inspect cables at depths of up to 300 meters. Working in tandem with unmanned surface vessels, it improves inspection efficiency tenfold compared to traditional manual methods, bolstering the security of China’s deep-sea energy and communication networks.

In China’s agricultural sector, a smart grain-leveling robot is tackling the arduous task of managing grain in massive silos. Equipped with special spiral wheels, it moves swiftly across loose grain. A team of three such robots can level a 1,400-square-meter silo in under a day, a task that would take three human workers three days.

This wave of innovation is no accident. Embodied AI has been explicitly named as a new engine for economic growth in China’s latest five-year plan, which commenced in 2026. The strategy is to foster development in key future industries, including robotics, AI, and 6G.

The progress is underpinned by what experts describe as a comprehensive industrial ecosystem and a vast array of real-world application scenarios. Major industrial clusters have rapidly formed in the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, encompassing over 24,000 companies and ranging from core components to full-system integration.(Xinhua)