Beijing embodied intelligence action plan 2025-2027

Background

Beijing's robotics policy has come in successive rounds. In June 2023 the city issued the Beijing Robot Industry Innovation and Development Action Plan (2023–2025) ^[1]. In January 2024 a 10-billion-yuan Beijing Robot Industry Development Fund was established ^[1]. The embodied intelligence plan that followed in 2025 extends this line of work from robots in general to systems that combine a physical body with AI models.

Embodied intelligence (具身智能) usually refers to AI systems that perceive and act in the physical world through a body — a robot arm, a humanoid, a mobile platform — rather than only producing text or images on a screen. Because such systems have to sense, plan and move in real environments, the field sits between AI software and hardware manufacturing, which is why industrial plans for it tend to mix research goals with production goals.

What the plan is

In March 2025 Beijing issued the Beijing Embodied Intelligence Technology Innovation and Industrial Cultivation Action Plan (2025–2027) ^[1][2]. The title names two things the plan is meant to do at once: technology innovation, and the cultivation of an industry around it.

The targets

By 2027 the plan sets out a series of quantitative goals. It targets more than 100 breakthroughs in key technologies ^[1], and at least 10 internationally leading software and hardware products ^[1]. On the organisational side, it aims to support at least 100 innovation entities in carrying out technology innovation ^[1], and to cultivate at least 50 core companies across the industrial chain ^[1].

On products and deployment, the plan targets at least 50 mass-production product models and at least 100 scaled applications ^[1]. It also states that Beijing aims to be the first to exceed 10,000 units in total mass production volume, and to build a 100-billion-yuan industrial cluster ^[1][2].

The targets therefore run along a chain: technology breakthroughs, then products, then companies and innovation entities, then mass production and applications, ending with an industrial cluster measured in output value. Putting a number on total units produced is a way of tying the plan to manufacturing rather than to research output alone.

Where the local industry stands

People's Daily reported that the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area had gathered more than 300 ecosystem companies, including Xiaomi Robotics and UBTECH, with the industrial chain scale exceeding 10 billion yuan and accounting for half of the city total ^[1]. That gives the plan's larger targets a starting base inside a single development zone.

Why it matters

The plan is a worked example of how a city government frames embodied intelligence as an industrial policy problem rather than a pure research problem. It names what should exist by 2027 — breakthroughs, products, companies, product models, applications, units produced, cluster size — and assigns numbers to each. Because the 2023 robot plan and the 2024 industry fund came first ^[1], the 2025 plan reads as a continuation of an existing support structure rather than a standalone announcement.

For readers following the field, the document is also a reference point for expectations: which parts of embodied intelligence a city believes it can count, and what scale it considers success.