A robot dog of Joyful Embodied seen at Digital China Summit in Fuzhou, Fujian province. HU MEIDONG/CHINA DAILY
As humanoid robots danced, drummed and poured coffee at China's latest tech showcase in Fuzhou, Fujian province, one of the largest crowds gathered around something far less glamorous: a worker wearing a virtual reality headset teaching a robot how to pick up a paper cup.
For robotics company Joyful Embodied, that moment captured what its CEO said is the real battleground in the global race for embodied artificial intelligence — not flashy hardware, but data.
"We are building a school for robots," Chen Yishi, CEO of Joyful Embodied, said in an exclusive interview with China Daily, describing plans for a massive robot data collection facility in Fujian that will operate around the clock.
The company plans to build a more than 3,000-square-meter training ground packed with fleets of humanoid, quadruped and wheeled robots performing real-world tasks across household, industrial and commercial settings.
