A screenshot from a video shows Seres’ Xiaosai humanoid robot.
- Seres showed off a humanoid robot called Xiaosai, saying more embodied intelligence products are in the pipeline.
- The carmaker joins peers including BYD and Xpeng in the race to build a presence in robotics.
Seres (SH: 601127) has revealed its first humanoid robot, becoming the latest Chinese carmaker to enter the field.
Kang Bo, a director and vice president of Seres Group, released a video on Monday showing the humanoid robot, named Xiaosai.
Seres has several other embodied intelligence robots in the works, and these products will make their official debut within this year, he said.
In the video, well-known Chinese actor Huang Bo visited a Seres plant, with Xiaosai serving as the guide for the tour.
According to official information, Xiaosai has visual recognition capabilities, and it can greet people on its own and engage in voice interaction.
The Seres plant is already equipped with various robots for different purposes, spanning areas such as AI quality inspection, logistics delivery and production-line collaboration, according to the company.
For example, an AI inspection robot called Xiaosai 01 handles quality checks for chassis assembly, while Xiaosai 02 inspects the exterior configuration of finished vehicles.
Seres said the smart hub of its plant features more than 1,600 intelligent devices working in coordination. In addition, over 3,000 industrial robots operate in sync.
The plant has also built a complete digital ecosystem, integrating technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data, digital twins, 5G, and AI, according to the company.
Notably, Seres has already been laying the groundwork for its embodied intelligence business.
In October last year, Seres and Volcengine, a unit of ByteDance, signed an embodied intelligence cooperation agreement in Beijing.
Under the agreement, the two sides will work together on decision-making, control and human-machine augmentation technologies for intelligent robots geared toward multimodal cloud-edge collaboration.
In China, carmakers branching out into robotics is becoming a broad industry trend, as they generally believe the capabilities built up in their auto businesses across supply chains, manufacturing and AI can be readily replicated in robotics.
He Xiaopeng, chairman and CEO of Xpeng (NYSE: XPEV), this month personally took on the role of “CEO” of the company’s robotics business to speed up commercialization.
BYD (HKEX: 1211) has also confirmed it is developing humanoid robots and is considering selling them through its dealer network in the future.
Meanwhile, Aimoga, a brand incubated by Chery, has begun selling humanoid robots to ordinary consumers, with a retail price of 285,800 yuan ($42,260).
RoboSense’s robotics LiDAR sales reached 185,500 units in the first quarter, accounting for more than half of its total shipments for the first time.
($1 = 6.7634 yuan)
