In the spring of 2026, marine science and technology have turned the spotlight onto an entirely new concept: **cross-medium technology**.
Recently, the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Marine Economy Development released the proposed project approval list for 2026 marine industry science and technology projects. A project led by Hangzhou Aohai Marine Engineering Technology Co., Ltd., and jointly applied by the East China Sea Laboratory and Zhejiang University — *Research on Cross-Medium Underwater Embodied Intelligent Robot Technology* — has been selected as a **major project** without suspense.
Traditionally, underwater robots (ROVs/AUVs) operate in the deep sea, quadruped robots run on land, and drones fly in the sky. They operate independently and never interfere with one another. Yet what Hangzhou Aohai aims to achieve is to break down this physical dimensional barrier.
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### From Specialized, Refined, Distinctive and Innovative Enterprises to Amphibious Operation: An Imperative Evolution
If you followed tech buzzwords in 2025, you will be familiar with the fact that **deep-sea science and technology** was written into the government work report for the first time. However, favorable policy trends are only a catalyst; the real driving force comes from urgent pain points in the industrial frontline.
For a long time, complex scenarios including coastal inspection, amphibious rescue and cross-domain logistics have remained the **Bermuda Triangle** of marine equipment. A purely underwater robot cannot move an inch on the rocks and mud of the intertidal zone; an unmanned ground vehicle can only watch helplessly at shallow waters. This disconnection of the "last mile" has created a huge gap in operational efficiency.
This is exactly the breakthrough point of Hangzhou Aohai’s approved project. Centered on **sea-land integration**, the project strives to develop a genuine marine embodied intelligent agent. This is far more than simply equipping robots with wheels or fins; it requires the robot to achieve a **seamless switch** of perception systems, power systems and even decision logic the moment it leaps from water onto land.
Notably, in February shortly ago, the team of Qu Juntian from the Tsinghua University Laboratory of Marine Soft Robotics and Intelligent Sensing launched an **intelligent bionic amphibious turtle robot**. By imitating turtle flippers, it realizes stable movement on complex intertidal terrain, with a real-time terrain classification accuracy of up to 99.17%.
The academic exploration and industrial breakthrough efforts have formed a remarkable resonance in the spring of 2026. This indicates that the penetration of embodied intelligence into the marine field is accelerating from laboratory **concept verification** to engineering **practical application**.
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### The Marine Era of Embodied Intelligence: Going Beyond Depth, Focusing on Cross-Medium Operation
As soon as the project list was announced, the industry’s focus was not merely on "embodied intelligence", but on its prefix: **cross-medium**.
Ye Cong, Director of the 702 Research Institute of China State Shipbuilding Corporation, offered a sobering observation on the integration of AI and deep-sea equipment: the marine environment is completely different from the terrestrial environment, imposing extremely special requirements on algorithms. Speaking of the popular embodied intelligence today, he noted that we have long developed bionic robotic fish, bionic crabs and other devices, which are prototypes of embodied intelligence. The current breakthrough lies in how to leverage their advantages of quiet operation, energy efficiency and low disturbance to adapt to unstructured, drastically changing extreme environments.
Hangzhou Aohai’s project precisely hits this core point.
The project’s proposed research areas of **fine deep-sea detection** and **coastal inspection** appear to be two separate scenarios, yet they address the same technical bottleneck: both the thousands-of-meters-deep ocean and the wave-splashed shore are **unstructured environments**. For robots, there are no smooth roads or fixed reference frames here.
Judging from the full released list, Zhejiang is mapping out a grand strategic layout. Besides Aohai’s project, the East China Sea Laboratory has been approved for two projects: *Research on Key Technologies for In-situ Fine Detection of Deep Seabed Based on Large UUVs* and *Deep-Sea Intelligent Multi-Beam Bathymetric Sonar Based on UUVs*, both targeting the intelligent upgrading and domestic substitution of deep-sea equipment. Meanwhile, Okai Intelligent Vessel recently set a new record for the largest single financing in China’s autonomous surface vehicle sector, and the commercialization of unmanned surface vessels is advancing at a rapid pace.
These signals form a clear industrial landscape: if 2025 marked the breakout year for terrestrial humanoid robots, 2026 may well be the turning point when **marine embodied intelligence** transitions from concepts to industrialization. Unlike humanoid robots pursuing a human-like form, marine robots aim to be **bio-like** — capable of flying, swimming and crawling.
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### Qiantang’s Ambition: From Manufacturing Base to Innovation Hub
Turning our attention back to the project leader, Hangzhou Aohai Marine Engineering Technology Co., Ltd. Rooted in Hangzhou Qiantang District, this enterprise is a typical technology-driven player in Zhejiang’s marine economic landscape.
As one of the province’s first and the city’s only provincial pilot zone for marine economy doubling platforms, Qiantang District has gathered 76 marine-themed enterprises, with output value of marine-related products reaching 1.12 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 11.8%. Aohai’s acquisition of this provincial major project is equivalent to planting a nuclear-grade seed in this industrial ecosystem.
The project partners, the East China Sea Laboratory and Zhejiang University, represent Zhoushan’s scientific research strengths and industrial testing foundations in deep-sea detection and marine equipment, as well as the academic height of basic research respectively. This "enterprise + laboratory + university" iron triangle structure directly addresses the biggest pain point of current marine equipment industrialization: cutting-edge technologies lack application scenarios, while application scenarios lack applicable technologies.
The R&D of cross-medium underwater embodied intelligent robots is essentially a competition for the right to define next-generation marine operational equipment. While Norway and the United States are still focusing on single-medium deep-sea equipment, Chinese research teams are exploring full-domain operational capabilities covering sea, land and air. This generational gap underpins Zhejiang’s strategy of building a strong marine province and seizing the commanding heights of marine science and technology.
After all, future marine competition will not be about who can dive deeper, but about who can perform operations more intelligently in complex environments.
