Shanghai, February 28, 2026 — In a landmark move for the future of physical intelligence, Noitom Robotics and the University of Hong Kong (HKU) officially signed a strategic cooperation agreement today. This partnership marks a new era of “industry-academia-research” collaboration, specifically targeting the construction of critical data infrastructure for Embodied AI.
A Gathering of Industry Visionaries
The signing ceremony and the unveiling of the new Joint Laboratory were attended by key figures from both the academic and industrial sectors.
Representing the partnership were Dr. Xinmin Tang, Co-founder and VP of Noitom Robotics, alongside Prof. Yi Ma, Director of HKU’s School of Computing and Data Science (HKU CDS) and Chair Professor of Artificial Intelligence, and Prof. Ping Luo, Assistant Director of HKU’s School of Computing and Data Science and Associate Professor. They were joined by industry leaders including Binjie Li, Senior Vice President of Unitree Robotics and Head of Shanghai Branch, and Zhige Zhang, Head of Embodied Intelligence Business at BrainCo, who witnessed the formalization of this strategic alliance.
Noitom Robotics: Turning Data into a Shared Asset
As a data-centric company serving the embodied AI and humanoid robotics sectors, Noitom Robotics is dedicated to building scalable data acquisition, processing, and delivery capabilities. Their mission: providing robots with learnable, reusable real-world experiences.
“We don’t make robots; we make them smarter.”
In his keynote, Dr. Xinmin Tang defined Noitom’s role as a primary “Data Infrastructure Provider.” While data has become the essential “fuel” for the industry, Dr. Tang noted that significant hurdles remain in multi-modal quality control and data alignment.
“The next phase of competition in Embodied AI is a competition of ecosystem engineering,” Dr. Tang emphasized. “Through our partnership with HKU, we aim to build quantifiable benchmarks and contribute open-source data assets that will benefit the entire industry.”
The collaboration will focus on three core pillars:
Hardware-In-The-Loop Validation: Verifying algorithms on physical robotic platforms to ensure intelligence is rooted in engineering practice.
Streamlined Pipelines: Integrating a “Data–Training–Evaluation” functional pipeline, leveraging Noitom’s technical edge in high-fidelity motion capture.
Standardized Benchmarks: Co-developing datasets and hosting technical challenges to drive the convergence and advancement of AI technologies.
Prof. Yi Ma: Moving Intelligence Beyond the Screen
In his address, Professor Yi Ma outlined the research focus of the newly established institute: next-generation “white-box” neural network architectures and world models.
“We must take intelligence from behind the screen and move it into the physical world. Interacting across that final millimeter or centimeter—that is the AI that truly impacts our reality.”
Professor Ma highlighted that the responsibility of academia extends beyond teaching; it is about defining the future and identifying what has yet to be achieved. “We need to look forward and tackle the most challenging problems,” he stated.
Through this deep collaboration with Noitom Robotics, Professor Ma expects to push the region’s AI sector from being a participant to a global leader—defining the future of physical agents and “Physical Intelligence.”
Looking Ahead: The Data Foundation of the Future
As the strategic partnership sets sail, Noitom Robotics and the HKU Shanghai Institute of Intelligent Computing will operate under the principle of “Complementary Strengths and Collaborative Innovation.” Noitom Robotics will step into a triple role: a builder of “Data Infrastructure,” a provider of “Systems Engineering” capabilities, and a “Co-promoter” of the industrial ecosystem. By leveraging its world-class motion capture and human-computer interaction technologies, Noitom Robotics aims to foster an open, shared data ecosystem that brings the benefits of Embodied AI to both industry and society at large.
Noitom Robotics
Noitom Robotics is a data infrastructure company for embodied AI. We build end-to-end pipelines that transform real-world human activity into synchronized, training-ready multimodal datasets—motion, vision, and interaction signals—at scale. By standardizing capture, labeling, quality control, and governance, NR helps teams overcome the data bottlenecks that limit robotic intelligence, including the cross-embodiment challenge of transferring learned skills across different robot forms. Our mission is to power faster, safer deployment of capable robots by making high-quality embodied data accessible, scalable, and production-grade. www.noitomrobotics.com