A team led by Associate Professor Wang Shitong from the School of Physics at Beihang University has won second prize at the HICOOL 2026 Global Entrepreneurship Competition for their project, "Factory Laboratory Based on Autonomous Evolving Physical Intelligent Agents for Industry—FactoryClaw."

The award was announced at the HICOOL 2026 Global Entrepreneur Summit, held recently at the China International Exhibition Center in Beijing's Shunyi District. This year's competition drew 10,209 entries from 13,472 entrepreneurs across 141 countries and regions, setting new records for both project submissions and participant numbers. Entries spanned frontier fields including artificial intelligence, biomedicine, new energy, quantum information and high-end equipment manufacturing. Of the thousands of projects submitted, only 12 received first prizes and 36 received second prizes.

FactoryClaw is designed to meet the manufacturing demands of future and strategic emerging industries, which are characterized by high-mix, low-volume, customized production and cross-disciplinary collaboration across hardware and software systems. The project aims to transform industrial know-how into productive capabilities that are callable, verifiable, executable and operationally manageable.

The project builds a three-layer architecture combining role-based "digital employee" capabilities, an Industrial Agent Operating System (AIA OS), and Minimal Embodied Execution Units (MEUs), linking requirement analysis, solution generation, controlled execution, data feedback and continuous learning into a single loop.

In this framework, digital employees are agent-based operators that learn continuously within a client's environment and carry out authorized tasks; industrial skills are standardized, testable, version-controlled and reusable units of technical know-how; and MEUs serve as pluggable "limbs" linking computers, interfaces, testing instruments, robots and flexible workstations. The AIA OS coordinates scenarios, tasks, permissions, version history, evidence and value across the system, allowing knowledge from different disciplines and capabilities from different software and hardware platforms to work together on real production tasks.

Wang Shitong is an associate professor, doctoral and master's supervisor at the School of Physics and a recipient of a national-level Young Talent Program award. He has studied and worked at Tsinghua University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Huawei. His research spans fast ion conductors, autonomous laboratories, battery management and optimization, and autonomous evolving agents, with a focus on using agents and minimal embodied execution units to meet customized manufacturing needs that cross disciplinary and technical boundaries, continuously driving research outcomes from the laboratory to industrial applications.

The award reflects Beihang faculty's active engagement in cross-disciplinary innovation at the industrial frontier and their efforts to translate research into practical applications. Moving forward, the team plans to continue developing the FactoryClaw platform, expanding its library of industrial skills, building out its MEU execution network, and validating benchmark use cases, while deepening collaboration with manufacturing companies, industrial parks, testing and pilot-production institutions, and other industry partners. The goal is to accelerate the deployment of autonomous evolving industrial embodied agents in real production scenarios, contributing Beihang's expertise and strength to AI-enabled future industries and strategic emerging sectors.

Editor: Lyu Xingyun