The swarm intelligence research group at the School of Mechatronics Engineering of the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), with 20 faculty members and nearly 100 master's and doctoral students, are building robots that walk, run, jump, and fly in formation.

Backed by a national key laboratory in near-sensing detection and control, the group studies perception, decision-making, and control, and has assembled fixed-wing and rotor drones, ground vehicles, quadruped and humanoid robots, and unmanned surface vessels that can be combined into swarms.

"We have built many platforms and can organize them into intelligent unmanned systems," said Mao Ruizhi, a senior experimentalist with the group. "Zhixingzhe was trained here, too."

At the 2026 Beijing E-Town Humanoid Robot Half Marathon, Zhixingzhe, or "the walker", covered the full 21 kilometers over more than 10 types of terrain, including city roads, wetland park paths, steep slopes, and turns of nearly 90 degrees, finishing without a single fall or interruption and taking second place in the best gait category.

The group's quadruped robot, which can jump forward and stand on its front legs, is trained with deep reinforcement learning: thousands of simulated robot dogs learn at once in a high-fidelity environment, while a dynamic estimation algorithm allows the machine to anticipate its surroundings. Motion data from real animals is added to make the movements more lifelike.

Meanwhile, in an indoor flight space under a motion-capture system, students test drone ideas of their own. "We have worked on drones for more than 20 years, from structural design to assembly, and from single aircraft to swarms," said Yang Yu, an associate research fellow with the group.

"Be upright in character, practical in work, and deep in scholarship" — the maxim of Ma Baohua, a scholar from an earlier generation of BIT — remains its guide. Over three generations, the group moved from technical foundations to complete systems, and now works on bionic intelligence, cooperative control, and embodied intelligence, and has trained hundreds of master's and doctoral graduates.