Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School (Tsinghua SIGS)

清华大学深圳国际研究生院

Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School (Tsinghua SIGS) is a public graduate education institution jointly established by Tsinghua University and the Shenzhen Municipal Government. It grew out of the Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University, founded in 2001, and the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, founded in 2014. Tsinghua and Shenzhen signed the co-founding agreement on 4 November 2016, the Ministry of Education approved the school on 6 November 2018, and it was formally inaugurated on 29 March 2019. The campus sits in the Xili Lake International Science and Education City in Shenzhen's University Town and covers about 22.48 hectares. Its disciplines include materials science, information technology, healthcare, ocean engineering, future habitat, environment and ecology, and innovation management. It hosts a graphene research center co-founded with Nobel laureate Andre Geim and a RISC-V international open-source laboratory, and has industry partnerships with Tencent, Huawei and China Southern Power Grid.

Its space robotics work is led by Professor Wang Xueqian of the Division of Information Science and Technology, director of the Intelligent Control and Tele-science Research Center and deputy director of the Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Space Robot and Tele-science. Trained at Harbin Institute of Technology, he joined the Shenzhen campus in 2014 and works on space robot system design, dynamics and control, teleoperation, deep reinforcement learning and fault diagnosis for on-orbit servicing. According to Tsinghua, his team has developed cable-driven space flexible manipulators, agile manipulators and a space-ground closed-loop teleoperation system based on three-dimensional hand gestures, and has completed several space missions. The team's results include a National Science and Technology Progress Award special prize, a National Technological Invention Award second prize and more than 150 granted invention patents.

The team's best-known flight hardware is the space flexible continuum manipulator flown on the Xiyuan-0 satellite, also designated Yuxing-3 06, built for the commercial on-orbit servicing company Sustain Space. The satellite was launched on 16 March 2026 on a Kuaizhou-11 Y7 rocket from Jiuquan to verify key technologies of a flexible arm for on-orbit refueling. Unlike rigid arms, the manipulator works like an elephant trunk: flexible spring tubes connected in series can curl, twist and coil to reach into confined spaces, and a motor-cable-joint-end-effector chain actuates it. Because small vibrations can disturb the host satellite's attitude, the team built extreme-condition constraints into the hardware and refined the control algorithms through repeated simulation and ground tests, including fixing arm oscillation caused by thermal deformation during thermal-vacuum testing. In orbit the arm achieved precise docking with fueling ports during simulated refueling.

The group also works on robotic manipulation in other harsh environments, including a variable-stiffness gripper that combines sensing and grasping for retrieving objects in turbid water. That gripper was nominated for a best mechanism design award at ICRA 2022.