Tencent Robotics X Lab

腾讯 Robotics X 实验室

Tencent Robotics X Lab is the robotics research laboratory of Tencent Holdings, set up in 2018 in Shenzhen for research and applications in robot mobility, dexterous manipulation and intelligent agents, with the long-term aim of building robots that work safely alongside people. The lab has been led since its start by Zhang Zhengyou, Tencent's chief scientist, who also directs the Futian Laboratory. He is known in computer vision for a widely used camera-calibration method. Robotics X publishes its work as research papers and demonstration robots. It does not sell robot hardware commercially.

Robots. The lab's hardware has been a series of research platforms:

• A self-balancing autonomous bicycle, the lab's first demonstration robot (press reports date it to 2018 or 2020).
• Jamoca (2020), the lab's first robot dog. Its robust balance and perception control algorithm was carried over to later robots.
• Max (first generation, March 2021), a multimodal quadruped whose legs end in wheels, so it can walk over obstacles or roll on flat ground. Demonstration videos show it standing on two legs, gliding at up to 25 km/h, crossing obstacles and doing a backward somersault. Tencent described its control system as reaching sub-millisecond control latency and named patrol, security and rescue as target uses.
• Max (second generation, August 2022), with reworked structure and electronics, real-time terrain recognition and mapping, and visual positioning. Tencent gives a positioning error below 1% and terrain-recognition accuracy under 2 cm during dynamic moves such as jumping between stepping piles. New features were landing detection from paw feedback and predictive control that combines jump trajectory planning with balance planning.
• Ollie (2021), a two-wheeled, legged balancing robot with a third wheeled limb used as a tail, so it can jump in a skateboard-style ollie, stretch to full height and support an arm. It was developed with researchers at New York University and the University of Manchester, and its balance controllers (LQR-based output regulation plus a nonlinear IDA-PBC controller) were described in an ICRA 2021 paper.
• TRX-Hand (2023), a dexterous robot hand.
• The Five (September 2024), a home-assistance research robot for elder care that combines four legs with wheels, tactile skin and hands. Tencent says it can walk, carry objects, handle multi-step tasks and interact with people in lab tests.

Software platform. At WAIC 2025 in Shanghai (late July 2025), Robotics X and the Futian Laboratory released Tairos, an open embodied-intelligence platform for robot makers and application developers. Tairos combines the SLAP3 model framework, made up of a planning model, a multimodal perception model and a perception-action model, with cloud services for simulation, training and data management. It is reached through SDKs and standard APIs, and developers can launch a cloud simulation environment with preset robots, scenes and tasks to test planning and perception models. Zhang has said Tencent wants to act as a software partner to robot manufacturers rather than build robots itself, and that Tairos is not meant to be a profit centre.

RobotToday lists Robotics X as a research organisation in its quadruped and legged landscape because of Max and Ollie, and as a source of robot foundation-model software through Tairos.