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On August 19th, Chinese company Zhongke Huiyuan has officially announced the launch of its first embodied quality inspection robot, dubbed “CASIVIBOT.” This milestone marks a significant expansion of the company’s core business beyond traditional automation equipment into cutting-edge embodied intelligence systems—a venture they have been developing over the past nine years.
In the rapidly evolving manufacturing landscape, product updates are happening at an unprecedented pace. For example, the consumer electronics sector alone is set to introduce over 400 new smartphone models in 2024. The lengthy lead time of several months for traditional automated optical inspection (AOI) equipment to be integrated into production lines has become a bottleneck, especially for industries dealing with highly fragmented, fast-changing inventories. Additionally, emerging raw materials and advanced manufacturing processes have led to a wider array of defect types, making it increasingly challenging for conventional machines to reliably perform final-stage inspections without human intervention.
CASIVIBOT aims to address these issues through an innovative approach. Rather than being just a “robot arm plus camera” setup, it is a sophisticated “embodied” inspector—a fusion of artificial intelligence large models and robotic technology, forming a “hand-eye-brain” collaborative intelligence system.
Key to its advanced capabilities are three proprietary platforms developed by Zhongke Huiyuan. The first, the “Jianxi Platform,” allows CASIVIBOT to learn from experienced inspectors by mimicking their detection techniques, thereby embedding human expertise into its operations. The second, the “Jianxin Platform,” incorporates a dual-modality visual language large model that enables the robot to not only identify defects visually but also comprehend their causes and characteristics using natural language processing. This supports the robot’s ability to perform few-shot transfer learning, adapting quickly to new defect types with minimal additional data. The third, the “Jianyun Platform,” is a cloud-based knowledge repository that facilitates collective learning and rapid deployment of inspection capabilities across multiple units, improving efficiency through shared intelligence.
Zhang Wujie, CEO of Zhongke Huiyuan, emphasized during the launch that CASIVIBOT is not designed to replace AOI equipment but to form a symbiotic quality control system where both technologies complement each other. In this system, AOI continues to handle high-volume, standardized, and rapid screening tasks on the front end. Meanwhile, CASIVIBOT focuses on more complex, non-standard inspections, including re-inspection of anomalies. As the robot learns from ongoing inspections, it can feed back insights to optimize and refine AOI algorithms, creating a continuous, self-improving cycle.
The company’s modular design and cloud platform are expected to make industrial quality control more accessible. Instead of a hefty upfront hardware investment, manufacturers can opt for a “robot-as-a-service” leasing model, allowing flexible deployment based on production needs. This approach promises to lower the barrier for small and medium-sized enterprises to adopt intelligent inspection solutions.
In addition to the product announcement, Zhongke Huiyuan announced collaboration with the Lingbao CASBOT team on the physical design of the robot, as well as the launch of a global partnership recruitment effort. The goal is to build an open industrial ecosystem centered on embodied intelligent inspection, fostering broader adoption and continuous innovation in this emerging field.
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