GIFT-SEER Robotics Launch Joint Embodied Intelligence Lab

The Global Institute of Future Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (GIFT) and SEER Robotics, a leading industrial robotics AI company, have established a joint Embodied Intelligence Laboratory on 14 August, 2026. Yue Zhao (Founder and CEO of SEER Robotics), Yangsheng Ye (Co-founder of SEER Robotics), Sun Jin (Executive Dean of GIFT), and GIFT Associate Professor Tong Qin attended the signing and unveiling ceremony.

Associate Professor Tong Qin will serve as the Director of the lab. Professor Qin is a prominent researcher in robotic spatial perception, visual-inertial navigation, and autonomous navigation. He is known for proposing and improving VINS (Visual-Inertial Navigation System), and was among the first cohort of Huawei's “Top Minds” Recruit.

SEER Robotics, founded in 2020, specializes in Robot Brain Technologies and intelligent robots. Supported by its robot brain technologies, it has developed a unified platform for developing, deploying, and managing diverse robot systems at scale, and leverages real-world industrial data to drive the evolution from automation to embodied intelligence.

Under the partnership, the lab will focus on bridging intelligent perception with the physical world. The two parties will focus their exploration on areas including multi-modal data modeling and scene understanding, and world model training and inference oriented toward robotic manipulation tasks.

Professor Qin's team will concentrate on environmental modeling and world-model pre-training, while SEER will contribute its robotic brain platform and real-scenario data loop. Together, they aim to close the gap between a robot’s ability to understand the world and its ability to act within it, and jointly build an innovative ecosystem for Embodied AI.

The collaboration is designed to accelerate the translation of cutting-edge academic research into industrial applications. The new lab will provide a high-level research platform with access to real-world datasets, advancing GIFT's strengths in intelligent perception, robot learning, and multi-modal interaction. Looking ahead, both parties will continue to explore pathways to innovate and commercialize embodied intelligence technologies.