Tencent's robot strategy is becoming increasingly clear

Author | Huang Yu

Editor | Wang Xiaojuan

At the recent 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), robots took center stage, evolving from last year's static display of the "Eighteen Arhats" to over 150 robots showcasing their "talents" in various scenarios. This reflects the acceleration of robots moving towards real-world applications.

Against this backdrop, Tencent, which aims to "become a partner for all robot manufacturers," officially launched the embodied intelligence open platform Tairos "Titanium Screw" at the WAIC flagship event.

Tairos was jointly released by Tencent's enterprise-level robotics laboratory Tencent Robotics X and Futian Laboratory. It is the first embodied intelligence software platform in China to provide large models, development tools, and data services in a modular way, opening up to the robotics industry through a plug-and-play approach.

Zhang Zhengyou, Tencent's Chief Scientist, Director of Robotics X Laboratory, and Director of Futian Laboratory, told Wall Street Insight that modularity is a major feature of Tairos, allowing robot manufacturers to select the necessary modules based on their needs. Additionally, the products offered by Tairos are quite comprehensive.

Specifically, the Tairos platform consists of two main components: model algorithms and cloud services. The model layer includes multimodal perception models, planning large models, and perception-action joint large models; the cloud service platform includes simulation platforms, data platforms, and development tools, providing services externally through standardized interface calls and software development kits (SDKs).

In terms of models, the multimodal perception model is akin to the human right brain, enabling robots to truly understand their environment. It allows robots to perceive the surrounding world through "vision" and "touch," organizing environmental perception information into a three-dimensional hierarchical map in real-time and retrieving it in a natural language question-and-answer format, providing sufficient information for robot interaction and task planning.

The planning large model is comparable to the human left brain, allowing robots to understand their roles and capabilities, comprehend task objectives, and break them down into executable strategic steps. In practical applications, the Tairos planning large model enables embodied intelligent agents to possess reasoning, cognition, reflection, and external tool invocation capabilities.

The perception-action joint large model is similar to the human cerebellum. This model bridges the critical link from "seeing" to "doing." It not only allows robots to know what the environment is like but also transforms this "knowledge" into safe and precise action instructions. Through three core technologies—spatiotemporal physical perception, language-visual pixel-level mapping, and zero-shot generalization—it enhances robots' understanding of the environment, task planning, and decision-making capabilities in complex scenarios.

Zhang Zhengyou stated that the Tairos embodied intelligence platform aims to equip robot bodies and application developers with essential software capabilities, akin to installing a "brain" in various robots, enabling them to perceive the world, plan tasks, and make autonomous decisions, evolving from passive execution of commands to actively adapting to the real world as intelligent beings The launch of Tairos directly reflects Tencent's strategic positioning in the robotics field. As early as the annual report communication meeting in March this year, Tencent's Chairman and CEO Jack Ma stated that Tencent hopes to become a partner for all robotics manufacturers rather than replacing them in hardware, which aligns with Tencent's overall strategic goals.

At this year's WAIC Tencent AI Forum, Zhang Zhengyou reiterated Tencent's strategic positioning and expressed the desire to be the "titanium screw" in the robotics industry.

Back in 2018, Jack Ma made an important decision to establish the Tencent Robotics X Laboratory, dedicated to the research and application of cutting-edge robotics technology.

Over the years, Tencent Robotics X Laboratory has successively launched several robots, including the multimodal quadruped robot Max, the wheeled-legged robot Ollie, and self-developed three-finger/five-finger dexterous hands TRX-Hand, self-developed robotic arms TRX-Arm, and the living environment robot prototype "Xiao Wu."

However, Zhang Zhengyou also told Wall Street Insight that the robots like Xiao Wu launched by Tencent are essentially not commercial products but research prototypes, and Tencent will continue to showcase and research hardware in the future.

The release of the Tairos embodied intelligence platform is another attempt by the laboratory, which has long been rooted in the robotics and artificial intelligence fields, to promote the upgrade of the robotics industry by combining large model technology.

Zhang Zhengyou pointed out that when Tencent Robotics X Laboratory was first established, there was no commercialization purpose because the situation in the robotics sector was very different from now, making it difficult to find manufacturers for robotics hardware. At that time, Tencent had to do both hardware and software from scratch.

"Starting from the second half of 2023, there has been a significant change in the entire robotics industry, one being the attention brought to AI large models by ChatGPT, leading to the emergence of many robotics companies and startups. From Tencent's perspective, it is necessary to work with robotics manufacturers and application manufacturers to refine our technology."

Since last year, robotics manufacturers have been accelerating commercialization, but they are still in the early stages.

Zhang Zhengyou believes that whether it is tackling core technology challenges or improving engineering implementation, to truly meet the high standards and strict requirements of diverse scenarios, and to bring embodied intelligence into thousands of households and frontline production services, significant efforts are still needed to continuously seek practical breakthroughs in key difficulties.

He stated that most companies face numerous obstacles in this process, with many "pits" hidden in every link from basic models to real machine deployment. The implementation of embodied intelligence is far more than just an algorithm issue or a model capability issue; it is an extremely complex, interlinked system engineering challenge that requires unifying the entire chain of data, training, debugging, and deployment.

Regarding the choice to launch the Tairos platform at this time, Zhang Zhengyou told Wall Street Insight that on one hand, Tencent has accumulated a lot of capabilities in embodied intelligence; on the other hand, after visiting sixty to seventy robotics-related companies, it was found that many of them lack these tools "We turn these tools into platform-based things that can enable the entire industry to develop faster and healthier; this is our starting point."

It is reported that the Tairos platform has currently collaborated with robot manufacturers such as Zhongqing, Yushu, Purdue, and Leju.

However, Zhang Zhengyou pointed out that the commercialization of humanoid robots is far from the "Big Brother era"; most are currently used for data collection, scientific research, and guiding. "So we hope to use the Tairos platform to help the industry enter the Big Brother era."

In his view, the "Big Brother era" will first appear in elderly care scenarios, but some believe it may emerge earlier in the industrial sector. However, regardless of the area, it is necessary to have a sufficiently large field so that the production volume can be large enough to reduce costs, allowing it to continuously enter every household.

Of course, this may be a very long process, and both enablers like Tencent and robot manufacturers need to have enough patience