Control robots with your thoughts: Chinese startup unveils world’s 1st ‘brain-to-robot’ platform | Technology News
3 min readNew DelhiJul 18, 2026 12:27 PM IST
Have you ever imagined controlling a robot simply by your thoughts? Well, it seems, that is possible now. Chinese tech unicorn BrainCo appears to have made a giant leap in embodied AI tech, or simply tech where AI is embedded in a physical system that learns by doing. The Brain-Controlled Robot AI platform was introduced at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, or WAIC, in Shanghai, China, on Friday, July 17.
The Chinese company has described its creation as the world’s first integrated ‘brain-to-robot’ platform which allows users to control robots with their thoughts without moving any muscle. And these movements are controlled using an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset worn by the user. The platform works by recording brain signals using the headset. The signals are later decoded using AI-based algorithms to identify the user’s intentions, translating them into actions for the robot. For instance, a robotic arm can be made to grab a cup or pick an object solely based on a user’s brain signals.
The Chinese innovation comes at a time when tech firms around the world are vying to develop the most advanced and capable embodied AI systems. These are systems that would integrate artificial intelligence into robots, endowing them with abilities like perception and reasoning and essentially allowing them to engage and interact with the real world. BrainCo claims that its platform works with a wide range of third-party hardware, including robotic arms, humanoid robots, robotic dogs, etc.
BrainCo is a pioneer in brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and was founded in 2015 in Hangzhou. It is part of Hangzhou’s ‘six little dragons’, an informal group of hi-tech firms from the city that have made a mark in AI, robotics, and other tech in the global arena. BrainCo focuses on non-invasive wearables and prosthetics. According to the company, its solutions could help solve one of the robotics industry’s most pressing concerns – the acute shortage of high-quality data. It believes that by bringing together real-world robot executions, human demos and virtual simulations, it can feed more diverse data sets into robotic brains.
Nyx He, partner and senior vice president of BrainCo, told the South China Morning Post that the embodied AI industry has made remarkable progress on what robots can do autonomously. The executive firmly believes that the next decisive frontier would be about how robots understand the humans they work with.
