Securing an order of more than 100 units within PetroChina's system, this company provides "inspection-operation integrated" robots for special hazardous chemical scenarios | 36Kr Exclusive

Source / Enterprise

This article is approximately 2600 words long, with an estimated reading time of 6 minutes

Author | Ou Xue

Editor | Yuan Silai

Hard Krypton learned that Xuanchuang Robot, a developer of special hazardous chemical industrial embodied robots, has completed tens of millions of yuan in Series A1 financing, with investors including Qianhai Ark, Guangyang Co., Ltd. and West Lake Science & Technology Venture Capital. The raised funds will be mainly used for data pipeline construction, training and deployment of the VLA model and JEPA world model, as well as stocking and production of standardized products.

Founded in December 2022, Xuanchuang Robot has long been deeply engaged in special hazardous chemical industrial scenarios such as oil and gas and chemical industries, focusing on the development and application of special embodied intelligent robots.

The company's core team mainly comes from Harbin Institute of Technology, and its technical achievements are derived from the R&D transformation of the Robotics Institute of Harbin Institute of Technology and Fujian (Quanzhou) Advanced Manufacturing Technology Research Institute. Fu Zhe, founder and CEO, has educational backgrounds from Harbin Institute of Technology, University of Birmingham, University of Sheffield and Imperial College London, and once worked for large foreign enterprises such as Schaeffler in charge of the energy sector business.

Overall, the traditional manual method has low efficiency and high risk in extreme environments, and the industry is facing severe personnel aging and labor shortage. Moreover, driven by the "15th Five-Year Plan", the unmanned operation of high-risk scenarios has become a clear trend.

"The urgency of the industry is accelerating the release of demand," Fu Zhe revealed. "This year, China National Petroleum Corporation has shifted from POC project procurement last year to batch procurement, which shows that the POC results have been recognized by relevant operating units."

Economy is another driving force. Fu Zhe said that in a landing case of a chemical enterprise, customers can recover the cost within one and a half years. The advantage of economy has driven many chemical enterprises to begin to formally deploy special robots.

The special hazardous chemical industry has large scale of equipment assets, dense installations and strong operation continuity, which puts extremely high requirements on the real-time performance and determinism of robots. Traditional inspection robots mainly operate relying on preset programs and fixed tracks, which can replace manual work to complete high-intensity, high-frequency standardized tasks, but cannot cope with complex unstructured environments.

The core technology of Xuanchuang Robot is its self-developed AEGIS system architecture. Dr. Tao Jin, head of R&D, believes that although large models are intelligent, they cannot directly meet the reliability requirements of high-risk industrial scenarios.

The logic of AEGIS is three-layer division of labor: the upper layer is responsible for understanding tasks and making decisions, the middle layer deduces actions, and the bottom layer is a safety barrier (once the large model sends unreasonable instructions, the system can intercept them within milliseconds). The three-layer decoupling makes the "slow" decision-making and "fast" control not interfere with each other, ensuring real-time performance.

In terms of model training, Xuanchuang Robot is currently mainly doing three things: first, collecting real scenario data with deployed robots, and accumulating it combined with operation data shared by owners; second, building its own simulation platform to make up for the shortage of real data with simulation data; third, deploying the VLA execution model, and testing based on the open-source JEPA world model to prepare for subsequent self-developed base models.

Explosion-proof air-ground integrated inspection robot (Source / Enterprise)

In terms of products, the company's product system has expanded from a single inspection line to two parallel lines of inspection and integrated inspection & operation. The inspection line covers three configurations: wheeled, rail-mounted and crawler-type, all of which have passed both explosion-proof and intrinsic safety certifications, and two new configurations of air-ground coordination and dual-wheel-foot have been added. The former uses drones paired with base stations to inspect high points such as towers, while the latter is specialized in narrow passages and low spaces.

Explosion-proof dual-wheel-foot inspection robot (Source / Enterprise)

Fu Zhe emphasized that the integration of inspection and operation is the main direction to come. Different from traditional inspection robots that "only detect but not process", it can directly complete operation tasks through the dual-arm actuator, realizing the parallel execution of inspection and operation. At present, this product performs tasks in the form of teleoperation and collects data synchronously, with the goal of realizing autonomous operation for routine tasks before 2030 and autonomous operation for complex scenarios before 2035.

Explosion-proof integrated inspection and operation robot (Source / Enterprise)

At present, the pending orders of Xuanchuang Robot have exceeded 100 million yuan. Among them, the first batch of more than 100 units signed by the company with CNPC Xinjiang Oilfield system has been delivered, and the delivery is continuing at a rate of 20 units per month. Meanwhile, the company has also won the bid for its first overseas oilfield intelligent project.

In terms of production capacity, the first set of equipment on the company's standardized final assembly line was rolled off the production line on July 30, and the production line was jointly built with listed company Guangyang Co., Ltd. Customer expansion is extending from oil and gas, chemical, non-ferrous metals and other hazardous chemical industrial scenarios, while the overseas market adopts a three-pronged strategy of central enterprises going global, distributors and direct sales, with a focus on layout in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Russia.

In addition to equipment sales, Xuanchuang is also exploring industrial services as the second growth curve. In response to the situation that small and medium-sized enterprises in the petrochemical and chemical industry have rigid demand but cannot afford large-scale procurement, the company has launched pilot programs in Quzhou, Ningbo and other places, charging by deploying robots and providing production safety monitoring and operation services in the plant area, which is expected to cover a large number of small and medium-sized customers and bring sustainable revenue.

The following is an excerpt of the conversation between Hard Krypton and Fu Zhe, Founder and CEO of the company (edited):

Hard Krypton: What are the cross-border difficulties of implementing embodied intelligence in special hazardous chemical industrial scenarios?

Fu Zhe: The real threshold of this industry is not in the laboratory, but on site. Explosion-proof certification is only an admission ticket. The real difficulty lies in understanding operation procedures and safety specifications. For a valve tightening action, the torque requirements and operation sequence are different in different stations and different working conditions. These experiences are not written in any paper, no matter how powerful the algorithm is, it cannot avoid the accumulation of industry know-how.

We have been immersed in this industry for many years, and the real scenario data collected on site alone covers multiple links such as oil and gas fields, refining and chemical, storage and transportation, which is accumulated over a long period of time and cannot be replicated in a short time.

Hard Krypton: Is the teleoperation mode highly accepted by customers?

Fu Zhe: At the beginning, customers also had doubts, thinking that teleoperation still relies on human operation, which is not real unmanned operation. But we calculated an account for them: in the past, workers had to wear full protective equipment and risk leakage to tighten valves and press switches, but now they can complete the work by operating robots through the screen in the central control room. In essence, the core value of human beings is shifted from "dangerous labor" to "decision-making and monitoring". The safety risk of workers is greatly reduced, and the work efficiency is higher. After customers figure this out, the acceptance is higher than we expected. Moreover, teleoperation itself is a process of data collection. Every time a task is completed, the model makes progress, which is the only way to full autonomy.

Hard Krypton: Why are your current product forms mainly wheeled, rail-mounted and crawler-type, rather than humanoid?

Fu Zhe: Humanoid robots are indeed very popular, but when we choose product forms, we only follow one standard: we make whatever the scenario needs.

Chemical plants are high-risk scenarios, and customers' requirements for reliability are far higher than their pursuit of specific forms. Wheeled chassis has higher efficiency on flat ground, rail-mounted is more suitable for fixed-route inspection, crawler-type copes with complex terrain, and dual-wheel-foot solves the problem of narrow passages. Each configuration is designed for specific problems.

Our current judgment is that in special hazardous chemical industrial scenarios, the execution scheme of traditional configurations such as wheeled, crawler, and track plus dual arms is more reliable, more economical, and easier to implement than bipedal humanoid robots. When the technology is more mature and customers have clear demand for humanoid forms, it will not be too late for us to develop them.

Investor Views:

Head of Qianhai Ark Investment: The special hazardous chemical industrial embodied intelligence track is one of the few landing tracks with rigid demand, compliance-driven features and batch delivery feasibility. Xuanchuang does not simply stack large models and hardware, but creates a unique engineering architecture to make up for the shortcomings of industrial safety, forming differentiated technical barriers. At the same time, it has accumulated a large number of leading industrial customers and real working condition data, with a clear commercial closed loop. We are optimistic about the company's potential to become a long-term industry leader.

Head of West Lake Science & Technology Venture Capital Investment: West Lake Science & Technology Venture Capital continues to lay out the hard technology and industrial AI track. The Xuanchuang team has full-chain capabilities of system algorithm, explosion-proof hardware and project delivery. This round of additional investment will help the company accelerate product R&D, expand benchmark customers in the Yangtze River Delta, and drive the development of the regional special robot industrial cluster.

Head of Guangyang Co., Ltd. Industrial Department: Guangyang has been deeply engaged in the manufacturing of precision servo and transmission parts for many years, which is highly synergistic with Xuanchuang's demand for explosion-proof execution hardware and motion control. This strategic investment will realize in-depth integration of upstream and downstream resources, and rely on the supply chain and mass production capacity of the listed company to help Xuanchuang quickly reduce the cost of complete machines, improve delivery capacity, and jointly build a complete industrial chain of domestic special embodied robots.