- Training is built around hands-on development from day one
- Program reflects China’s strategic focus on embodied intelligence education
Students entering Zhejiang University’s new embodied AI major in 2026 will be handed their own robot systems on day one, as the school pushes to blur the line between classroom learning and real-world deployment, a senior faculty member said.
“I let students start learning and practicing on a commercial-grade general platform from the beginning, with some of the problems coming directly from real applications,” said Cheng Peng, dean of the university’s College of Control Science and Engineering, in a recent interview with Tidenews, a Zhejiang media outlet.
“In other words, it is scenario-driven and problem-led rapid learning and rapid testing. You can learn as you go along.”
Housed within the College of Control Science and Engineering, the program will begin recruiting students this fall.
Cheng, a Changjiang Scholar, outlined Zhejiang University’s approach to the newly established “embodied intelligence” major and its broader talent pipeline.
The program is also supported by deep industry collaboration, including access to commercial-grade robotics platforms from the outset.
“We encourage open exploration,” he said. “There is no single correct answer, but the direction has to be clear — adapting to complex environments and different application needs.”
New AI-related disciplines
The newly created major is part of a wave of new AI-related disciplines introduced under China’s 2026 undergraduate program catalog released by the Ministry of Education in early May.
Zhejiang University, or Zheda for short, has added embodied intelligence, energy storage science and engineering, and intelligent engineering and creative design as new majors.
Embodied intelligence, which focuses on bridging AI systems from digital perception into physical environments, has become a strategic focus in global technology competition.
It has also been included in China’s government work report for two consecutive years as part of future industry development priorities.
Cheng said the program is designed to be deeply interdisciplinary, combining expertise from multiple schools within the university.
“This is not something that can be done only by the College of Control Science and Engineering,” he explained in a recent interview with Tidenews.
“We are coordinating efforts across the College of Artificial Intelligence, the College of Computer Science, the College of Mechanical Engineering, and others, bringing together the strongest resources — software, hardware, faculty, and also industry partners — to support the program.”
Zhejiang University’s College of Control Science and Engineering has long been a breeding ground for talent in embodied intelligence and bionic robotics.
Among its notable figures are Professor Zhu Qiuguo and assistant professor Li Chao, both affiliated with the university’s robotics laboratory before co-founding DEEP Robotics (云深处科技).
He contrasted embodied intelligence with traditional robotics education. Conventional robots, he said, are typically designed for specialized tasks, where one function defines one structure and control systems are tuned accordingly.
Transferable capabilities
The new approach, by contrast, aims to develop general-purpose systems with transferable capabilities across environments.
“For example, a quadruped robot might run on flat ground today, and also operate on sand and grass, and later climb slopes,” he explained.
Under the new training model, students are expected to move away from narrow specialization toward cross-disciplinary competence.
“They need to not only understand machine learning, but also control systems, structural constraints, and kinematics,” Cheng said. “They integrate these previously separated domains and become the intersection point themselves.”
The goal, he added, is that each student graduates having significantly upgraded the robot systems they were given at entry.
“By the time they graduate, that system should become very, very intelligent,” he said.
The program will initially enroll six students under Zhejiang’s “three-in-one” admissions framework, which combines high school academic records, university assessments, and national college entrance exam scores into a composite ranking for admission within the province.
National college entrance exam quotas will be released later in the official admissions notice.
