ZhiYuan takes the lead in deploying 10,000 humanoid robots, turning "toys into productivity"

Ask AI · How can Zhiren (智元) make the leap from hand-built workshops to industrial-grade manufacturing?

On March 30, Peng Zhihui (left), co-founder, president, and CTO of Unitree Robotics, announced that Zhiren’s 10,000th general-purpose humanoid embodied robot—Yuan Zheng (远征) A3—was officially rolled off the production line.

“10,000 units isn’t the finish line; it’s proof that we have the capability, through the key step of engineering-based certainty, to truly turn embodied intelligence from a toy into future productive power.” Peng Zhihui, co-founder and CTO of Unitree Robotics, said in an interview with The Paper (www.thepaper.cn). On March 30, the roll-out ceremony for Unitree Robotics’ 10,000 units was held at the company’s mass-production factory in Zhiren’s Zhangjiang Robot Valley. Just 3 months earlier, the company had announced that it would deliver 5,000 units of its general-purpose embodied robots on a cumulative annual basis. The leap from 5,000 to 10,000 units in mass production is a crucial turning point for supply-chain maturity and manufacturing standardization, signaling that the embodied robotics industry is fully moving from “technology validation” to “scale commercial deployment.”

Achieving large-scale mass production is one of the most challenging technical problems in humanoid robotics. Peng Zhihui candidly said that the challenges behind mass production of 10,000 units encompass capability improvements across five dimensions: manufacturing efficiency, scenario deployment, customer value, data flywheel, and supply chain. This includes significant upgrades to the capability to manufacture the robot’s body, how to balance product quality and consistency, and optimization of the supply chain and the entire ecosystem.

“We did some early industry research and found that, in the market, there weren’t core component suppliers that could adapt to our needs for batch delivery at scale and that were mature and reliable. We grew together with the suppliers.” Peng Zhihui said. Now, Zhiren’s capability to manufacture the robot’s body has completed an overall leap from the earliest “hand-built workshop” to “industrial-grade standards.” In the past year, Zhiren established the world’s first standardized supply system for embodied intelligence. For core components such as joints and dexterous hands, it adopted new processes to ensure the components are lighter, have longer service life, and at the same time lower costs. In addition, it restructured the production model, building a “half-hour supply ring-chain” and requiring suppliers to be able to respond within half an hour.

As large-scale production advances, the manufacturing cost of general-purpose humanoid robots is expected to continue to decline; at the same time, the massive amount of data accumulated from multi-scenario operation will also feed back into technical iteration. According to Peng Zhihui’s explanation, when 10,000 robots begin working in real-world scenarios, the data they provide comes from real environments. These high-value data can better help train the robot base model, making the model more generalizable and more practical.

Wang Chuang, partner of Zhiren Robotics, senior vice president, and general manager of the general business division, revealed that the 10,000 robots will be deployed across eight major commercial scenarios, including for explanations and receptions and work such as factory loading and unloading, carried out in scenarios like scientific research users, data collection, and entertainment performances. Wang Chuang also said that in 2027, Zhiren hopes to achieve even larger-scale mass production: “By the end of 2027, we can see another milestone together with the roll-out of 100,000 units.”

This year, the humanoid robotics track is entering a key window for large-scale deliveries, and multiple leading manufacturers have put 10,000-unit-level mass production on their agenda.

As previously reported by The Paper, Wang Xingxing, founder of Unitree (宇树) Technology, said externally in February this year that Unitree’s target shipment volume for 2026 is 10,000 to 20,000 units. Unitree’s actual humanoid robot shipments in 2025 exceeded 5,500 units. Another robotics company, UBTECH (优必选), also mentioned that its target for industrial humanoid robot production capacity within 2026 has pointed to a 10,000-unit level.

Why has mass production of 10,000 units become a goal that the industry is jointly targeting? Jiang Zheyuan, founder and chairman of Songyan Power (松延动力), previously said that if a robotics company’s delivery scale in 2026 can break through 10,000 units, in a certain sense, it is comparable to a single enterprise achieving a level close to the global total industry volume for 2025. In the view of industry insiders, for humanoid robotics companies, breaking through 10,000 units at the market delivery end, and breaking through 100,000 units at the consumer market delivery end, are the basic quantitative indicators for validating PMF (product-market fit).