China’s First Embodied Intelligent Special Robot Put into High-Risk Scenario Application

On the vertical outer wall of a tens-of-meter-high chemical storage tank, a silver-white figure walks freely close to the cold steel plate. Without a safety belt, it operates in mid-air steadily relying solely on strong electromagnetic suction, with flexible humanoid arms—one holding a welding torch to strike an arc precisely and the other a flaw detector to scan carefully, moving as smoothly as an experienced master. This is the working scene of China’s first embodied intelligent special robot put into high-risk scenario application.

Science and Technology Daily reports that high-altitude operation has long been a pain point for production safety and a bottleneck for labor shortage. Data shows that falls from heights account for more than 54% of construction accidents in China all year round, while the proportion of working-age population continues to decline. In the ship derusting segment, traditional manual sandblasting is only 6 to 8 square meters per hour with severe dust pollution, making intelligent equipment an urgent need to replace manual labor and reduce personnel.

"In the past, workers hung in the air, exposed to wind and sun for hours, with dust making it impossible to open their eyes. Now, operators wear VR glasses in a cool control room, and with a slight movement of their wrists, the robot replicates the actions 1:1 on the wall with millisecond-level response," Xu Huayang, Founder and CEO of Zhejiang Shihe Technology Co., Ltd., a R&D enterprise of professional embodied intelligent special robots, showed the shock of high human-machine synchronization.

Xu introduced that unlike traditional high-altitude robots with single functions, this robot breaks the barrier between artificial intelligence and physical operations. Weighing 90 kilograms, its lower body is an "off-road vehicle" equipped with a wheeled magnetic suction chassis, which can move stably even with an adult hanging; the upper body has 15-degree-of-freedom humanoid arms, which can switch seamlessly between welding, flaw detection, derusting and spraying by changing hand tools.

The "brain" driving this steel body is currently China’s largest special robot large model in terms of accumulated data, with a total operation time of over 100,000 hours and a travel distance enough to circle most of the Earth’s equator. "Every high-altitude operation is a data collection, and each batch of data accumulation is directly used for model iteration and upgrading," Xu said.

Xu emphasized that special robots need to follow the "four-high" logic—high ceiling, high frequency of use, high added value and high labor cost—to achieve large-scale commercialization. Shihe Technology has seized more than 70% of China’s ship derusting market share, completed derusting for over 10,000 100,000-ton cargo ships, and ranked first in global shipments in multiple categories.

As the first year of the implementation of the "15th Five-Year Plan", the outline proposes accelerating the development of strategic emerging industries including robots and promoting embodied intelligence to become a new economic growth point. "Embodied intelligent special robots are not only a replacement for human hands, but also a ‘national key weapon’ serving national strategic transformation," Xu said, noting they will play an irreplaceable role in deep-sea platform maintenance and petrochemical emergency disposal.