36Kr Exclusive | The Only Company in China and One of the Only Two in the World to Produce Micron-Level Magnetic Levitation Magic Carpets, with Large-Scale Mass Production Achieved

Author: Ou Xue

Editor: Yuan Silai

In traditional factories, the assembly line is like a train fixed on the tracks - efficient but rigid. The pain point of "incompatibility between efficiency and flexibility" is being solved by a Chinese company with "maglev" technology.

Foshan Zengguang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Zengguang Intelligent") was established in 2018 and is headquartered in Foshan. It is one of the only two companies in the world and the only one in China that has mastered the core technology of the six - degree - of - freedom planar maglev conveying system.

"This technology covers a wide range - communication, control, operating systems, and magnetic field simulation. It's very difficult to perfect each aspect," recalled Huang Anjie, the founder of the company. After five years of research and development, Zengguang Intelligent officially launched its maglev products in 2023 and successfully achieved large - scale mass production and sales within the following two years.

The core product of Zengguang Intelligent, the planar maglev intelligent conveying system (maglev magic carpet), looks like a "desktop" made up of square stator blocks. The movers (carrier plates) of the product can levitate contactlessly on the desktop and move freely with a maximum acceleration of 2G and micron - level positioning accuracy.

The "desktop - type" production line spliced by square stators (Image source: the enterprise)

Different from the "railway mode" of traditional conveyor belts, the maglev magic carpet realizes the "highway mode": the movers can independently overtake, merge, rotate, and even complete processes such as gluing, assembly, and force - control detection while conveying. Each mover itself is also a natural six - dimensional force sensor.

"Traditional production lines often sacrifice flexibility to improve efficiency, while maglev solves this problem at the physical level," Huang Anjie told Hard Krypton.

The mover (carrier plate) with six degrees of freedom, enabling "autonomous driving" for intelligent scheduling of the production line (Image source: the enterprise)

Overall, Zengguang Intelligent's products have three core technological advantages. First, the microsecond - level synchronous communication protocol can synchronously control tens of thousands of drives within 50 microseconds. Second, the six - dimensional magnetic field positioning technology can achieve micron - level pose perception only through magnetic field calculation without relying on any encoders or cameras. Third, the self - developed multi - physical - field finite element simulation software is used for the design and optimization of the underlying magnetic circuit.

A new - type production line integrating "conveying and process execution" (Image source: the enterprise)

In terms of technological evolution, Zengguang Intelligent plans to continuously improve the speed, load, and accuracy of maglev and penetrate into larger - size load scenarios such as lithium - ion batteries from the precision 3C field.

"The pursuit of flexibility and efficiency in advanced manufacturing is endless," said Huang Anjie. "What we need to do now is to broaden this path."

The following is an excerpt from the dialogue between Hard Krypton and Huang Anjie:

Hard Krypton: You are the only ones in China capable of making six - dimensional maglev. Where is the technological threshold?

Huang Anjie: There are many difficulties. First is communication - tens of thousands of drives need to be synchronized at the microsecond level, and the existing industrial buses are difficult to support. So we wrote our own communication protocol and self - developed infrastructure such as switches. Second is positioning - calculating six - dimensional coordinates purely through the magnetic field without relying on encoders, with micron - level accuracy. Finally, it's the underlying simulation - we independently developed multi - physical - field finite element software for the design of the magnetic circuit. So it's not that others don't want to get involved, but the technological complexity is too high. That's why it took us five years to enter the mass - production stage.

Hard Krypton: What are the technological differences between you and overseas peers?

Huang Anjie: They are more like "setting planned tracks" - customers need to program and plan the path themselves to prevent mover collisions. We are "autonomous driving" - you only need to specify the starting and ending points, and the system will automatically schedule, prevent collisions, and optimize the path. In addition, our movers can rotate while moving. This is an advantage brought by the difference in the underlying magnetic field design, as we developed and designed it from scratch.

Each mover (carrier plate) can achieve "autonomous driving" (Image source: the enterprise)

Hard Krypton: Facing the rapid development of embodied intelligence, what are the competitive advantages of your products in the field of intelligent manufacturing?

Huang Anjie: Our products have a high level of technological content and scarcity. The scheduling algorithms of our products are all driven by AI with reinforcement learning. In fact, our competitiveness comes from the combined strength of software and hardware.

We believe that in the future, the AI of embodied intelligence will tend to be equal, and the bottleneck will return to hardware - which hardware is smaller, faster, more precise, and has a longer lifespan? Maglev has no wear and tear, and its micron - level accuracy can be maintained for ten years without decline. The floor area of the production line can be directly reduced by more than 60%. This is the optimal solution for precision scenarios.