ROKAE Robotics and the Multimodal embodied AI and Robotic Systems (MARS) Lab at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, have jointly established an Embodied Intelligence Innovation Center. Dr. Jianfei Yang, Assistant Professor at NTU and Director of MARS Lab, will serve as Principal Investigator.
The center will focus on developing multimodal, high-speed inference models for embodied intelligence in real-world applications, building high-quality industry datasets, and accelerating the deployment of embodied AI across industrial and service environments.
About the Principal Investigator
Dr. Jianfei Yang, being listed among Stanford University's World's Top 2% Scientists, is an internationally recognized researcher in Physical AI and multimodal robotics. He leads MARS Lab at NTU's Schools of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Electrical and Electronic Engineering, with research spanning multimodal perception, human-robot interaction, robotic manipulation, and embodied locomotion. Dr. Yang serves as Associate Editor for two leading AI journals — IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems and Neurocomputing — and has placed first in over ten international AI competitions.
Prior to joining NTU, he held positions as Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University and the University of Tokyo, and Senior Research Engineer at BEARS, UC Berkeley.
ROKAE's Embodied Intelligence Platform
ROKAE has shipped over 10,000 embodied intelligence robot units to date, with deployments in automotive, 3C electronics, and new energy sectors covering material handling, inspection, and transfer operations. The company ranks among the global leaders in force-controlled humanoid arm shipments and force-controlled application market share.
The company's embodied intelligence product lineup — the HSA integrated force-controlled joint, AR humanoid force-controlled arm series, and wheeled dual-arm robot — forms a complete product portfolio. Underlying this is ROKAE's full-stack proprietary software and hardware platform, including the xCore robot control platform and xVision integrated vision-control technology, alongside years of accumulated process and data collection experience across industrial scenarios.
ROKAE's value to ecosystem partners rests on three pillars: production-ready hardware that bypasses prototype-stage risk; an open architecture that gives partners access to hardware interfaces, advanced SDK, and process data across the full hardware-data-model-deployment chain; and a standardized, modular product matrix that eliminates redundant supply chain, engineering, and debugging effort — allowing partners focus on core algorithm development and application deployment.
Bridging Research and Industry
The collaboration brings together MARS Lab's frontier research capabilities in AI and ROKAE's decade of experience in robot hardware design, motion control, volume manufacturing, and industrial deployment. Together, the center will develop multimodal high-speed inference models grounded in world-model-based long-horizon reasoning, supported by a systematic data pipeline combining real-robot collection, UMI (Universal Manipulation Interface), and simulation, enabling continuous model iteration and improvement.
The goal is to equip robots with stronger environmental perception, autonomous decision-making, real-time response, and the ability to generalize across diverse open-world tasks.
Dr. Jianfei Yang, Director of NTU MARS Lab, commented: "Embodied intelligence is at a pivotal transition from laboratory to real-world application. Together with ROKAE, we aim to translate cutting-edge research into productivity that solves genuine problems in real environments, enabling robots not only to perceive the physical world, but to understand it and execute diverse tasks efficiently, safely, and naturally."
Tuo Hua, Founder and CEO of ROKAE Robotics, said: "Scaling embodied intelligence commercially requires deep collaboration across research, industry, and application. This partnership with NTU MARS Lab and Dr. Jianfei Yang strengthens ROKAE's position at the frontier of embodied intelligence and enhances our global competitiveness. ROKAE will continue to combine full-stack software and hardware capabilities with an open ecosystem approach, working with partners across the industry to drive the high-quality, large-scale development of embodied intelligence."
