Ahead of the 2026 World Robot Conference (WRC 2026), the Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (AIRS) announced that AIRSEAI, the embodied-intelligence open-source project it initiated, has formally joined the LF AI & Data Foundation under the Linux Foundation. It will publish its roadmap and community plan at the conference for global developers, research bodies, robot firms and industry users. This is the first technology project under LF AI & Data focused on embodied intelligence.
The Linux Foundation is among the world’s largest open-source collaboration ecosystems, supporting more than 1,300 projects with roughly 855,000 code contributors and over 21,000 participating organisations. LF AI & Data backs open-source AI and data innovation with neutral governance, community building, compliance, security and outreach.
For AIRSEAI, joining LF AI & Data means a Shenzhen-born research output moves from an in-house R&D platform to a neutrally governed, globally co-built open model, giving local and overseas institutions a shared public infrastructure for embodied intelligence.
Liu Shaoshan, director of the embodied-intelligence centre at AIRS and the project’s initiator, argues that general capability cannot emerge from hardware or model stacking alone. “The truly sustainable path is to let the system keep surfacing problems in real tasks, accumulate data, expand capability, and preserve effective modules through open collaboration,” he said. “AIRSEAI joining the Linux Foundation turns that evolution from one team’s engineering process into a global community mechanism.”
AIRSEAI is not built around a single robot product. It follows a principle of solving the key bottleneck exposed in the previous stage, progressing from modular single-robot planning, to data-driven dual-arm general manipulation, to adaptive swarm intelligence across heterogeneous robots. Generation one secures stable single-robot operation. Generation two lets robots gain complex physical manipulation through data. Generation three lets different robots coordinate in open, dynamic environments.
The embodied-intelligence stack spans robot bodies, sensors, chips, base models, control, data, simulation, evaluation and application. No single firm can build all of it. The Linux Foundation supplies neutral governance, open contribution flows, intellectual-property and compliance support, and global ecosystem links, so different players can innovate around shared interfaces instead of being locked to one vendor or one robot form.
After joining, AIRSEAI will evolve through a technical steering committee, open discussions, a transparent roadmap and an open contribution process. Near-term work centres on AIRSEAI 2.0 multimodal data and deployment loops, stronger dual-arm operation and tactile sensing, stricter capability boundaries and sim-to-real evaluation, and broader compatibility with third-party robots and compute platforms.
The choice to announce at the World Robot Conference sends a clear signal about Shenzhen’s industry. The city has a complete robot hardware manufacturing chain, and AIRSEAI fills the open-source gap in the base software layer. “We hope to tell the global community clearly: China can not only build abundant robot bodies, but is also willing to contribute open base software, data flows and system methods to build the public technological foundation of the embodied-intelligence era with international developers,” Liu said.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Shenzhen News report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.