The 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference is held in Shanghai from July 17 to 20. [Photo/The official news website of Zhoushan]

IMC Shipyard (Zhoushan), a ship repair and engineering enterprise based in East China's Zhejiang province, has partnered with COSMOPlat and SKE (Shanghai) Engineering to launch an initiative to develop an AI-powered ship repair platform.

The three companies signed an agreement to jointly build the "Next-Gen Hybrid Swarms of AI Agents and Robots With a Central Intelligent Core for Ship Maintenance" during the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, held in Shanghai from July 17 to 20, to advance the digital and low-carbon transformation of the global ship repair industry.

The project will combine an AI-powered decision-making platform with robotic systems to support frontline ship repair operations. The partners plan to deploy AI and robot clusters in hazardous and labor-intensive tasks, improving worker safety while enhancing production efficiency and reducing carbon emissions.

The platform will also connect upstream and downstream industrial supply chains, supporting functions such as predictive maintenance, fault diagnosis, and dynamic production scheduling.

The partners aim to complete the project's initial phase within two years, with the long-term plan being to build an intelligent ecosystem centered on lifecycle health management for ships, integrating logistics, energy, and smart equipment to support the modernization of the global ship repair industry.