Qiyuan builds its 5,000th personal robot, with daily capacity now above 200

Qiyuan Robotics said on Oct 25 that its 5,000th personal robot came off the production line, a month after it began selling the Qiyuan Q1 and Qiyuan T1 on Sep 20. The limit it is running into is the factory, not demand. Qiyuan is the personal-robot brand of Shanghai-listed Swancor Advanced Materials; AgiBot is Swancor's controlling shareholder.

Daily capacity has risen from "10-odd" robots to "more than 200," Gao Quanzhong, Qiyuan co-president and head of central R&D, said at the company's Shanghai event. He put the line at one robot every 2.5 minutes and said zero to 5,000 units of stable mass production took one month from the line's start. The 2.5-minute figure was already Qiyuan's claim at the September launch, when CEO Tian Hua said the company builds "to car-making standards and efficiency." The new numbers are the 5,000 units and the 200-a-day capacity; at that cadence, 200 robots is 500 minutes of line time, a little over eight hours.

Huguang brought a car-parts quality system onto the line

The line borrows its methods from auto-parts supplier Huguang. Zhou Ye, director of Huguang's robot manufacturing plant, said the core value of the cooperation is moving years of automotive-parts precision manufacturing, mature process methods and full-process quality traceability into whole-robot manufacturing. The target is the industry's old complaint that "prototypes are easy to make, mass production is hard to stabilize." Qiyuan says it and its suppliers built a raw-material automated warehouse, a semi-automated assembly line it calls a first, and an end-to-end manufacturing IT system for full traceability, all aimed at consistency at the 10,000-unit level. It lists million-cycle wire-harness bending and 100,000-cycle joint durability tests among its mass-production standards.

The line still trails demand. At Qiyuan's Huaihai Middle Road store in Shanghai, Caiwen was told the robots were sold out, with only small stock left in some colors, and that an order placed on Oct 25 could only be a reservation. The Q1, an 88 cm, roughly 15 kg humanoid robot that folds into a backpack, starts at 19,999 yuan; the Explorer edition is 26,999 yuan. The T1, about 100 cm tall, switches between a wheel-legged humanoid form and a quadruped form; the T1 Pro is 29,999 yuan. Staff said families buy for English practice and homework help; companies load corporate content for offices or trade shows.

Qiyuan's usage figures cover a smaller group than the 5,000: "some users who have received" a robot use it more than an hour a day on average, heavy users more than three hours, with more than 150 effective interactions a day. If the company published an order count, the reservation queue could be read against it. An OTA update due at the end of October adds English speaking practice with Youdao Hi Echo, better following in complex environments, and remote video calls and control.

At the Oct 25 event Gao handed the T1 numbered NO.5000 to user representative Dong Xuan, while the same day the Huaihai Middle Road store's sales system showed Dec 8 as the earliest delivery for a new order.