At a trade fair with more than 400 robot exhibitors, the demo that drew a crowd was not a better gripper or a tighter tolerance. It was three machines handing work to each other.
Zhongke Diwuji showed a relay at the 26th China International Industry Fair: three Jiling-L1 wheeled dual-arm robots took turns depalletising, pouring material, receiving it and restacking it, running a complete material flow with no human intervention between stations.
The point of the exercise is the handover. Each robot completing its own motion well is the easy half. Coordinating the transfer of material and the succession of tasks requires perception, manipulation, mobility and scheduling to work as one system.
From single-machine skill to process skill
Industrial automation has always been designed around fixed equipment and fixed sequences. Once several robots can cooperate, a factory can organise cross-station transfer and multi-step loading into one process, which is what makes flexible production and the so-called intelligent island model practical.
Zhongke Diwuji is aiming that at the repetitive, high-intensity work that has to run continuously: precision loading and unloading, bin transfer, regular palletising and scrap recovery in consumer electronics, auto parts and light manufacturing.
The competitive ground shifts with it. Competition moves from how capable one robot is to how much value one process produces, which is a different kind of engineering problem and a much harder one to demo.
The reuse problem
Before any of that scales, someone has to answer an unglamorous question. Does every new robot body and every new workstation require a fresh training run?
That is the capability reuse problem that has kept industrial robots expensive to deploy. The same task on a different kinematic structure, with a different end effector and a different controller, does not transfer cleanly.
The company’s answer is Jiyuan Lingnao, a new embodied brain built on its in-house FAM series of models and an Action Flow technique aimed at cross-embodiment transfer. If a wheeled humanoid has already learned to grasp and place, moving that task to another body should reuse part of the learned capability instead of starting from zero.
A second mechanism uses heatmap-based few-shot learning for the long tail of low-frequency, non-standard tasks that fill real factories, where collecting large demonstration sets for each one is uneconomic.
Hardware follows the task. Jiling-L1 is a wheeled base with dual arms for moving work. The newly released Jiling-S1 is a column-mounted machine with 19 degrees of freedom, a lifting column and a 360 degree waist rotation that covers different heights and orientations, paired with force control and modular quick-change end effectors for precision assembly and warehousing.
What has actually shipped
The commercial evidence is thinner than the demo but real. Zhongke Diwuji says it is running in industrial bin handling, intelligent assembly and inspection operations at renewable energy sites, with partners including Leapmotor, Sinopec and Midea.
At one substation, a robot carrying its embodied operating brain completed indoor and outdoor high-precision inspection and operating tasks with a success rate above 96 per cent and cut manual site attendance by 70 per cent.
Overseas, the company claims several hundred million RMB in aggregate orders from unnamed leading foreign enterprises, with fulfilment under way, and says it will push into Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and Japan and Korea. It has also signed with Boyan Technology’s Singapore international headquarters to pair its embodied brain with local delivery capacity in Southeast Asia.
Group intelligence is a reasonable thesis. It is also the kind of thesis that only survives contact with a customer’s uptime requirements, and those numbers are not public yet.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Zhidx report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.zhidx.com/p/603898.html.