From 'robotic arm' to 'smart brain' - humanoid robots accelerate into the first year of mass production
75 Beijing, March 8 (Xinhua) -- On March 7, Xinhua Daily Telegraph published a report titled "From "Robotic Arm" to "Smart Brain" -- Humanoid Robots Accelerate into the First Year of Mass Production."
Under the command of the data collector's operating handle, rows of robots learn various skills: serving tea, ironing clothes, vacuuming the floor, and arranging supermarket shelves; on the riverside trail, robots run with their legs and feet, not only steady but also flexible to avoid pedestrians; in the hospital clinic, exoskeleton robots help elderly people with hemiplegia stand up and walk again...
The future is here. With the iterative empowerment of artificial intelligence and large models, robots not only have more dexterous bodies, but also have smarter brains. Humanoid robots are accelerating towards the first year of mass production. Perhaps in the near future, spending 50,000 yuan to buy a humanoid robot to help you do housework will no longer be a fantasy.
Walking into the first phase factory of Zhiyuan Xinchuang Technology Co., Ltd., the first mass production factory of humanoid robots in Shanghai, robots are being assembled, debugged and rolled off the production line in an orderly manner. The annual production capacity reaches thousands of units, and the orders are still growing.
In the 4,000-square-meter Zhiyuan Robot Data Collection Center, hundreds of data collectors wear VR glasses and hold operating handles to teach robots to do housework "hand in hand" in daily life scenes such as restaurants, milk tea shops, and homes - folding clothes, cleaning dishes, pouring tea, delivering meals, cleaning tables, and supermarket cashiers...
At the data collection center of Zhiyuan New Technology Co., Ltd., a data collector "teaches" the robot to wipe the table. (Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Gong Wen) From "embodiment" to "intelligence", robots are like embarking on a journey to seek the truth, and they have to pass many levels.
"Just like a person has more than 200 bones, the Zhiyuan humanoid robot A2 has more than 400 parts. Before the whole machine test, each robot must undergo multiple sub-item tests, such as squatting with a single leg load of 30 kilograms, which requires more than 2,000 tests to avoid unstable walking or falling afterwards." Yao Maoqing, executive dean of Zhiyuan Robotics Research Institute and president of the embodied business department, said.
After passing the manufacturing level, there is also the training level. First, it is to complete a variety of tasks under program design, so that the robot has a general "perception" of the physical world, can avoid obstacles and walk, etc., and then professional training, replicating real application scenarios such as home, shopping malls, offices, restaurants, etc., so that the robot can learn to deal with more complex tasks in an open environment.
For example, pouring water is a very simple thing in the eyes of humans, but robots may need to learn hundreds of times: they can pour water into cup A and cup B, and they can also pour water into cup B. If the cup is moved temporarily or the light becomes dim, the robot must be able to respond freely and not spill water outside.
Recently, Zhiyuan Robotics has opened up a massive simulation data set, covering five major scenarios: home, supermarket, office, catering and industry, as well as more than 180 categories of specific items and 12 core skills.
"This is another open source action in embodied intelligence data after the open source project of one million real machine data sets in December last year." Yao Maoqing said that like an extremely efficient virtual training room, the simulation data set can help robots quickly master all kinds of martial arts.
Everyone contributes data, so that everyone can share data. Yao Maoqing said that in the past year, the field of embodied intelligence has ushered in explosive development, and the role of large-scale robot operation data is indispensable. In 2025, the company will launch more data to attract more developers to participate in the innovation of embodied intelligence, promote the popularization of technology, and strive to achieve "humanoid robots are made by everyone".
Humanoid robots are expected to become disruptive products after computers, smartphones, and new energy vehicles, setting off a new round of industrial revolution.
According to the "Guiding Opinions on the Innovation and Development of Humanoid Robots" issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in 2023, by 2025, the humanoid robot innovation system will be initially established, and a number of key technologies such as "brain, cerebellum, and limbs" will achieve breakthroughs; the whole machine products will reach the international advanced level and achieve mass production; by 2027, the technical innovation capabilities of humanoid robots will be significantly improved, forming a safe and reliable industrial chain supply chain system, and building an internationally competitive industrial ecology; the application scenarios will be more abundant, and related products will be deeply integrated into the real economy, becoming an important new engine of economic growth.
According to industry estimates, by the end of 2024, there will be nearly 100 humanoid robot companies in the country, and more than 30 companies have announced that they will start commercial mass production in 2025.
"One-third of the global robot production is in China, and one-third of China's robot production is in Shanghai." On the "eve" of the outbreak of humanoid robots, Shanghai has accumulated a variety of elements for the development of the robot industry-technology, talents, supply chain, policies, etc.
"Shanghai has a high talent density and internationalization level, and its industries are rich and concentrated, providing sufficient talent and resource reserves for corporate development. At the same time, Shanghai also has great advantages in supply chain and application scenarios. Humanoid robots can be quickly commercialized and feed back to R&D and manufacturing." Zeng Xiang, vice president of Shanghai Fourier Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. said.
It is reported that Shanghai Fourier Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., founded in 2015, started from intelligent rehabilitation and has now entered the trillion-level general robot track, with humanoid robots as the key strategic direction. The general humanoid robot GR-1, which was first released in 2023, has been mass-produced; after more than a year of research and development iterations, the second-generation general humanoid robot GR-2 was released last year, and has been experimentally applied in bank guides, automobile manufacturing, medical rehabilitation and other fields.
"Relying on a deep scientific research background, a high-density and high-quality talent cluster, an efficient and coordinated industrial chain collaboration, and a rich and diverse data base, the Yangtze River Delta region, led by Shanghai, is still expected to lead the humanoid robot track." Yao Maoqing said.
Not long ago, at the 2025 Global Developer Pioneer Conference held in Shanghai, both humanoid robots and related dexterous hands, large models, etc. were popular booths, attracting many visitors and industry insiders to communicate.
Jiang Lei, chief scientist of the National and Local Co-construction Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, said at the meeting: "With the continuous advancement of technology and the cooperation of developers, a revolutionary change in humanoid robots will be triggered."
Before the Spring Festival this year, the National and Local Center launched the country's first heterogeneous humanoid robot training ground, which brought together more than 100 heterogeneous humanoid robots. "At present, the training ground can generate tens of thousands of data every day, and it is expected that 10 million data will be accumulated this year. Some training data sets will be open and shared through the OpenLoong open source community of the National and Local Center, inviting humanoid robot whole machine companies, embodied intelligence R&D teams, and scientific research institutes to continue to improve and jointly break through bottlenecks." Jiang Lei said.
It is worth mentioning that humanoid robots have begun to go abroad and have established close cooperative relations with overseas partners. At the beginning of this year, Zhiyuan planned to build a factory in Kazakhstan to produce humanoid robots. It is expected that under the cooperation framework, Zhiyuan will cooperate with the Ministry of Digital Development of Kazakhstan to launch a "data factory" for training robots and robot systems.
Zhang Ying, director of the Shanghai Economic and Information Commission, said that in the "15th Five-Year Plan", Shanghai will seize strategic opportunities, accelerate the establishment of a policy and system system that is compatible with the smart economy, systematically promote the integrated layout of new elements such as intelligent computing, corpus, scenarios, capital, and talents, and create a full-chain open source ecological service system.
From factories to living rooms, robots still need to pass the "upgrade test"
Humanoid robots equipped with artificial intelligence are entering more fields and opening up more tracks at an unprecedented speed and density. Many experts believe that although the mass production of humanoid robots can be expected in 2025, the application still faces challenges, and it is necessary to overcome eight key technologies such as safety, emotion, and interaction, especially to solve the problem of home-based elderly care, which is too early.
Yushu Robot, which "went viral" by dancing Yangko in the Spring Festival Gala, is currently in short supply. However, Sun Baoyan, marketing manager of Yushu Technology, said: "Everyone hopes to buy a robot to help with housework right away, but from the current point of view, there is still a long way to go in terms of hardware and software. I hope everyone will wait patiently to avoid a gap between good expectations and actual applications."
Wang Qibin, CEO of Beijing Lingchu Intelligent Technology, also admitted that compared with the "accelerator" of open source for the robot's "brain", the optimization of the "body" requires more time and patience. For example, breakthroughs in lightweight skeletons, high-strength body structures, high-precision sensors and other technologies are not achieved overnight.
The industry believes that similar to the classification of autonomous driving, humanoid robots are also divided into levels. In order to better regulate the development and application of humanoid robots, it is necessary to ensure technological progress while taking into account safety, ethics and social impact. Last year, the group standards of "Guidelines for the Classification and Grading of Humanoid Robots" and "Guidelines for the Grading of Embodied Intelligence Development Stages" were released in Shanghai. According to embodied intelligence, lower limb movement, upper limb operation, and application environment as grading factors, humanoid robots are divided into four technical levels from L1 to L4; according to core capabilities such as perception, cognition, decision-making, and autonomy as grading factors, the intelligence level is divided into five stages from basic to advanced intelligence levels from G1 to G5.
In addition, a number of companies and research institutions jointly launched the "Co-construction of Embodied Intelligence Corpus Data Ecology" initiative and signed a letter of intent for cooperation in embodied intelligence corpus operations.
"This will not only make all aspects of the embodied intelligence field of humanoid robots in my country have rules to follow, evidence to check, and standards to rely on, but will also guide companies and scientific research institutions to carry out the research and development and application of embodied intelligence technology for humanoid robots in a more orderly manner, avoiding unhealthy competition and waste of resources." said Xu Bin, general manager of the National Land Center.
Recently, relevant departments in Shanghai are conducting further research to promote the establishment of similar technology evaluation and certification systems and other platforms, and carry out evaluation and certification of robot bodies, embodied intelligence models, and application scenarios. Relying on the existing training ground, we will build a national-level assessment and certification "examination room" to promote the "certification-based employment" of humanoid robots.
Xiong Jijun, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, who attended the opening ceremony of the 2025 Global Developer Pioneer Conference, said that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will adhere to innovation-driven and application-driven development to create a good development environment for developers and provide strong support for the realization of new industrialization. First, we will make good innovation "first moves" and enhance the ability to innovate key technologies. Second, we will improve the open source "ecosystem" and build an advanced open source service system. Third, we will create an application "test field" to accelerate the implementation of technology products. Fourth, we will build a talent "reservoir" to stimulate the innovative vitality of global developers. Fifth, we will integrate into the international "big stage" and expand the space for global exchanges and cooperation.
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