- Sixteen teams navigated open-water currents, poor visibility and submerged obstacles in emergency rescue scenarios
- Event highlights growing demand for robotic systems in high-risk underwater operations
Sixteen underwater robotics teams from across China gathered at Hangzhou’s Tongjian Lake last week to compete in one of the country’s few open-water robot rescue competitions, as emergency response agencies look for alternatives to dangerous human diving operations.
The underwater emergency rescue event, held from May 15 to 16 as part of the 2026 Hangzhou International Embodied Robot Scenario Application Competition, required teams to guide self-developed underwater robots through a full sequence of search, positioning, retrieval and return tasks across the lake’s thousand-acre natural water area.
Unlike controlled indoor pool tests, the competition took place in real open-water conditions, where shifting winds, changing underwater visibility, hidden currents and entangling vegetation created a far more unpredictable environment for robotic navigation and manipulation.
Organizers placed five different target objects at varying underwater depths, including a national flag that robots had to autonomously extract using robotic arms, testing both underwater positioning accuracy and precision manipulation capabilities.
AOHI Ocean, a Hangzhou-based marine engineering startup specializing in so-called remotely operated vehicle (ROV), or underwater drone, won the competition with a self-developed robot that stood out for payload capacity and overall task completion performance.
Earlier this year, the company partnered with state-backed Donghai Laboratory and Zhejiang University on a provincial-level research project focused on developing cross-medium embodied underwater robots capable of operating both above and below water.
The competition also highlighted growing interest from public safety agencies. Representatives from Hangzhou’s public security bureau and emergency management bureau said underwater rescue operations still rely heavily on divers working in hazardous conditions.
Therefore, there is urgent demand for robots equipped with sonar and AI systems capable of assisting or replacing human responders, they said.
“Once these robots are deployed in the future, our team members’ safety will be much better protected,” said He Changfu, a member of Blu Skey Rescue, China’s largest civilian non-governmental emergency rescue organization.
Zhao Lei, an executive at one of the event organizers, said the competition was designed to help bridge the gap between robotics research and industrial deployment. “We want to connect technology with real-world applications,” he said.
