OpenLoong

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OpenLoong is a Chinese government-backed open-source humanoid robot initiative operated by the National and Local Co-built Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center in Shanghai, and the developer of the Qinglong (青龙, "green dragon"), presented in Chinese state media as China's first full-sized, open-source, general-purpose humanoid robot. The center publishes the entire humanoid technology stack, including hardware designs, control frameworks, algorithms, and datasets, under the Apache License 2.0. It was jointly established in December 2023 by state-owned enterprises and industry-leading companies, with a registered capital of 1 billion yuan (about USD 140 million). In May 2024, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Shanghai Municipal Government officially designated the center as the country's "National and Local Co-built Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center," giving it national-level status in coordinating humanoid robot research and development across China.^[1][2][3]

The OpenLoong community provides open-source hardware designs, software packages, datasets, and development tools for the Qinglong series of full-sized humanoid robots, with the stated goal of accelerating innovation and collaboration in the global robotics and artificial intelligence communities. The project is stewarded by the OpenAtom Foundation, which also hosts other major Chinese open-source projects such as OpenHarmony and openEuler.^[4][5]

History

When and how was OpenLoong established?

In December 2023, Humanoid Robotics (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. and the Shanghai Humanoid Robotics Manufacturing Innovation Center were officially established as a new research and development institution jointly founded by state-owned backbone enterprises and industry-leading firms. The center is located in the Zhangjiang Robot Valley in Shanghai's Pudong New Area and focuses on core technology development, product engineering, and application ecosystem construction for full-sized humanoid robots. Xu Bin serves as general manager and Jiang Lei serves as chief scientist.^[1][2]

In May 2024, China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Shanghai Municipal Government formally designated the Shanghai facility as the country's "National and Local Co-built Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center," elevating it to a national-level institution. This designation gave the center a coordinating role across China's six regional humanoid robot innovation hubs, with the explicit mission of building an open-source ecosystem to complement work happening in Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Chengdu, and elsewhere.^[2][3]

Qinglong robot unveiling at WAIC 2024

In June 2024 the center launched the OpenLoong open-source community website, described in Chinese state media as the world's first open-source community platform devoted to full-sized general-purpose humanoid robots.^[6] One month later, at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) 2024 in Shanghai (held 4 to 7 July 2024), the center unveiled the Qinglong humanoid robot, presented as China's first full-sized, open-source, general-purpose humanoid robot. Chief scientist Jiang Lei explained the naming and the open-source strategy: "In the Year of the Dragon this year, we named our humanoid robot Qinglong [meaning green dragon in Chinese] and initiated an open-source community for humanoid robotics." He added that "through open-sourcing, our goal is to introduce a new humanoid robot model annually, each named after one of the Chinese zodiac animals, to foster a humanoid robot innovation community unique to China."^[7][8]

At WAIC 2024 the center released the Qinglong V1.0 hardware structure and design parameters publicly through the OpenLoong website, with associated software packages and embodied intelligence stacks following over the next year. General manager Xu Bin stated that the full stack of humanoid robot technology, including the "brain," "cerebellum," and limb control, would be released to the public as open source.^[8]

What is the Qilin humanoid robot training base?

In January 2025 the innovation center opened a heterogeneous humanoid robot training base, named the Qilin (麒麟) training ground, in the Zhangjiang area of Shanghai. Described as China's first heterogeneous humanoid robot training ground, the facility occupies over 5,000 square meters and can accommodate more than 100 humanoid robots from different manufacturers at the same time.^{[6][9][10][18]} Robots from over ten companies and research institutions, including Fourier Intelligence and AgiBot, signed up to train across more than ten reconfigurable, high-fidelity scenarios grouped into three focus areas: smart manufacturing, public services, and specialized applications. Reported task success rates across activities such as welding, sorting, and desk organization exceeded 90 percent.^[18] Jiang Lei described the facility as "a factory that produces data," with sensor logs from all participating robots collected, annotated in real time, and fed back into the OpenLoong open-source datasets. By 2027 the center aims to train 1,000 general-purpose robots simultaneously and to collect 10 million high-quality real-world data entries through collaborations with local manufacturers.^{[6][9][10][18]}

In February 2025 the center hosted a forum on open-source humanoid robotics, where Xu Bin announced that 2025 plans included expanding the community capability stack and tightening cooperation with the OpenAtom Foundation. Industry standards work also accelerated during this period; the center led drafting on more than 80 industry standards for the sector, including the country's first batch of embodied intelligence standards released in Shanghai.^[6][11]

Gewu platform, MindLoongGPT, and Qinglong V3.0

In March 2025 the center partnered with Shanghai University and Tsinghua University to release the Gewu (格物) embodied intelligence simulation platform, fully open-sourced through the OpenLoong community. Gewu provides "one-click training" and "one-click migration" workflows for developers, and its general reinforcement learning framework with automated model adaptation allows algorithms to be trained across more than 100 mainstream commercial robots without rewriting code for each platform.^[5]

On 30 May 2025, at the Zhangjiang Embodied Intelligence Developer Conference, the center released MindLoongGPT (Longyue), billed as the world's first generative humanoid robot motion large model.^[17] On 5 August 2025 it released the third generation of the Qinglong robot, Qinglong V3.0, with 60 degrees of freedom compared with 43 on the original Qinglong V1.0. The V3.0 model adds a modular design that lets users swap walking, working, and perception modules depending on the task, and it integrates with the Gewu Zhizhi ("investigation of things, knowledge of nature") cooperative training platform for embodied AI models.^[12]

What did OpenLoong unveil at WAIC 2025?

At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference 2025 in Shanghai (held 26 to 28 July 2025), the center introduced three robots from the Qinglong series, each tailored to a different set of application scenarios spanning security, manufacturing, science education, tourism, industrial operations, and urban services.^[16] The headline model, Qinglong Pro, stands 185 cm tall and weighs 85 kg and is equipped with a full-body array of multidimensional sensors, including visible light, infrared thermal imaging, and gas detection, together with upgraded spatiotemporal positioning that lets it patrol parks, industrial zones, and other outdoor environments.^[16] The center also showed lighter and wheeled variants of the platform alongside the flagship Qinglong V3.0.^[19] WAIC 2025 featured more than 60 humanoid models from over 80 firms, up from roughly 18 humanoid models a year earlier, and coverage noted that the machines had moved from static displays and novelty dances to practical tasks such as laundry folding, sorting, and food service, an ecosystem that OpenLoong helped seed.^[19][20]

How is OpenLoong funded?

The center has established a humanoid robot industry fund with a first-phase target of 2 billion yuan (about USD 276 million) and a long-term target of 10 billion yuan (about USD 1.4 billion). A separate community-incentive fund of roughly 3 million yuan provides per-project grants of 300,000 to 500,000 yuan to encourage external developers to build on the OpenLoong stack.^[2][6]

Products and technology

What is the Qinglong robot?

OpenLoong's flagship products are the Qinglong full-sized humanoid robots. Public technical disclosures cover two main generations:

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Qinglong is positioned as a research and reference platform rather than a commercial product. The robot supports multi-modal locomotion, perception, and manipulation, with demonstrations at WAIC 2024 showing rapid walking, dynamic obstacle avoidance, stable movement on slopes, and precision pick-and-place tasks with the dexterous hand.^[7][8][13] Beyond the numbered generations, the center has fielded application-specific variants of the platform, including the sensor-heavy Qinglong Pro for outdoor security and industrial patrol and lighter and wheeled versions, all sharing the same open-source stack.^[16][19]

Embodied intelligence stack

OpenLoong's embodied intelligence stack is organized into modules with distinctive Chinese mythological names:

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MindLoongGPT, also known as Longyue, was released on 30 May 2025 and described by the center as the world's first generative humanoid robot motion large model.^[17] The roughly 7-billion parameter multi-modal model, developed with a team from the School of Information Science and Technology at Fudan University, lets users issue natural-language commands such as "wave" or upload a reference video; it then parses the semantics and generates high-fidelity, coherent motion trajectories for the Qinglong robot. The Suzaku brain and Xuanwu cerebellum modules work together with MindLoongGPT to translate language and perception into joint-level commands.^[2][13][17]

Is OpenLoong open source? GitHub repositories

Yes. OpenLoong's code is published on GitHub under the loongOpen organization, with most repositories licensed under Apache 2.0. As of 2025 the organization hosts more than 30 repositories; the most active include:

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OpenLoong-Dyn-Control is the most-starred repository; it ships with three demonstration controllers (walking, jumping, and blind obstacle stepping) and uses the MuJoCo simulator, the Pinocchio dynamics library, and Eigen for linear algebra. The control framework combines Model Predictive Control for trajectory optimization with Whole-Body Control for instantaneous joint commands, and the codebase is self-contained so that users can clone, build, and run the demos without installing external dependencies. Some active development has migrated to the AtomGit platform run by the OpenAtom Foundation at atomgit.com/openloong, with GitHub kept as a public mirror.^[4][14]

Gewu simulation platform

Released in March 2025, the Gewu platform addresses one of the harder problems in humanoid robotics: training a policy that has to work on many physically different robot bodies. Its automated model adaptation pipeline reads the URDF or equivalent kinematic description of a target robot, then retargets a trained policy onto that robot's joint layout without manual rewriting. The platform supports more than 100 commercial humanoid platforms from Chinese and international vendors, and the same one-click migration mechanism is used to bridge between Gewu's simulation and the physical Qinglong robot deployed at the Qilin training base.^[5]

Mission and positioning

OpenLoong serves as a shared research and development infrastructure for China's humanoid robotics industry rather than a commercial robotics manufacturer. The center operates as an R&D and integration hub, providing shared laboratories, testbeds, and demonstration spaces where universities, startups, and manufacturers can co-develop perception, control, and actuation technologies. This model is closer to a national laboratory than to a typical robotics company, and the Apache 2.0 licensing of most code makes it usable by commercial firms without copyleft obligations.^[2][6]

China has established six major humanoid robot innovation centers nationwide, with the Shanghai center (OpenLoong) being the national-level entity focused on open-source ecosystem development. Each of the other regional centers has a different emphasis: Beijing's hub centers on open platforms and the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center (X-Humanoid), Hangzhou on consumer-facing form factors, Chengdu on lightweight designs, and so on. OpenLoong sits above and across these regional hubs in the sense that participating firms anywhere in the country can train robots at the Shanghai facility and pull from the same open-source datasets.^[2]

The OpenLoong stack is often discussed alongside other open humanoid initiatives, including the Berkeley Humanoid Lite project in the United States and Open-X-Humanoid's Pelican-VL embodied brain models from the Beijing center. Compared with closed commercial platforms such as Tesla Optimus or Figure AI, OpenLoong's value proposition is that researchers can inspect and modify every layer of the stack, from CAD files and joint torque curves up through the Suzaku brain and the MindLoongGPT motion model.^[4][13]

Reception and impact

Chinese state media (China Daily, Xinhua, People's Daily) has covered OpenLoong heavily since the Qinglong unveiling at WAIC 2024, and the project is frequently cited in policy discussions of China's humanoid robotics push. International technology press, including TechNode, Interesting Engineering, AI Business, Fox News, and Yicai Global, covered the launch and have continued to track the V3.0 release, the WAIC 2025 Qinglong Pro debut, and the Qilin training base.^{[7][8][9][10][16][18]} Shanghai's overall humanoid robot output passed 1,000 units in 2024 according to Zhang Hongtao, deputy director of Shanghai's economy commission, with OpenLoong serving as the shared software and data backbone for many of those deployments.^[6]

Independent academic adoption is visible through the Loong open platform paper published in 2025 in the journal Biomimetics, which discusses the OpenLoong system as a reference platform for practical full-sized humanoid robot research. The OpenLoong-Dyn-Control repository has been forked by independent researchers and by integration projects such as the dora-rs humanoid examples, indicating that the codebase is being used outside the original Shanghai consortium.^[14][15]

See also

• Qinglong V3.0
• Humanoid robots
• Open-source AI
• Embodied AI
• Fourier Intelligence
• AgiBot
• Tesla Optimus
• Figure AI
• Unitree
• MuJoCo
• Model predictive control

References

1. "Shanghai: Building an Open-Source 'Brain' and Digital Ecosystem Pool." Gasgoo Auto News. ↩
2. "Overview of the latest development of the six major humanoid robot innovation centers in China." CMRA. ↩
3. "China Sets Up Humanoid Robot Innovation Hub." Yicai Global. ↩
4. OpenLoong organization on GitHub. ↩
5. "OpenLoong releases Gewu embodied intelligence platform with Shanghai University and Tsinghua." People's Daily, March 2025. ↩
6. "Forum champions open source for humanoid robotics boom." China Daily, February 2025. ↩
7. "Qinglong, China's first full-sized general-purpose humanoid robot." TechNode, 5 July 2024. ↩
8. "Qinglong: China introduces 1st full-sized general-purpose humanoid robot." Interesting Engineering, July 2024. ↩
9. "China's first humanoid robot training base opens in Shanghai." Yicai Global, January 2025. ↩
10. "Shanghai launches 1st training base for robots." China Daily, 23 January 2025. ↩
11. "The Country's First Batch Of Humanoid Robot Embodied Intelligence Standards Were Released in Shanghai." Sango Automation news. ↩
12. "Qinglong V3.0: China's Open-Source Humanoid Robot Debuts." RoboHorizon, August 2025. ↩
13. "Qinglong V3.0 Humanoid Robot by OpenLoong." Humanoid Guide. ↩
14. OpenLoong-Dyn-Control on GitHub: Whole-Body Dynamics Control Software Package for Humanoid Robots. ↩
15. Wang Yang et al. "Loong: An Open-Source Platform for Full-Size Universal Humanoid Robot Toward Better Practicality." Biomimetics, 2025. ↩
16. "Shanghai innovation center unveils three Qinglong-series humanoid robots at WAIC 2025." Digital China Summit / Xinhua, 29 July 2025. ↩
17. "Global release of MindLoongGPT (Longyue), the world's first generative humanoid robot motion large model." AIbase, May 2025. ↩
18. "China launches facility to train 100-plus humanoid robots simultaneously." Fox News, 2025. ↩
19. Mike Kalil. "Top 20+ Chinese Humanoid Robots from Summer 2025." ↩
20. "China's humanoid robots evolve from showpieces to service staff." DigiTimes, 30 July 2025. ↩