After 20,000 units of Zhiyuan rolled off the production line, the industry began to "create" robots.

On September 24, the 20,000th embodied intelligent robot, Expedition A3 Ultra, was officially delivered at Chimelong Spaceship Park in Hengqin.

On the same day, more than 300 Zhiyuan robots began regular operations in the park, distributed across more than 100 interactive points, covering scenarios such as performances, science popularization, tour guiding, retail, hotels, and sports competitions.

From signing the agreement on August 23 to the official opening of the park, the two parties only had one month.

Wang Chuang, partner, senior vice president, and president of the general business unit at Zhiyuan, said in a group interview with the media that afternoon that the 300 robots correspond to hundreds of locations, and their functions include explanation, table tennis, basketball, golf, calligraphy, and rock-paper-scissors. They also need to complete model upgrades, IP makeup, material production, and on-site installation. "The biggest challenge is time."

The production of the 20,000th robot solved the problem of mass production. After the robots entered Chimelong, they faced another set of problems: whether they could operate stably every day, whether tourists would be willing to use them, and whether the problems exposed on-site could be incorporated into the next round of model and product updates.

The scene begins to participate in the "manufacturing" of robots .

01 From Delivery to Operations

Chimelong acquired these robots through a purchase agreement, with both parties signing a 10-year strategic cooperation agreement and establishing the Embossed Intelligent Cultural Tourism Joint Research Institute.

In an interview, Xiong Yan, partner and co-president of Zhiyuan, broke down the "deployment state" into three requirements: operability, normalization, and replicability.

Operational means that the robot can continue to improve its capabilities after deployment ; normalization requires that the robot can be on duty every day and does not depend on a one-time performance; replicability means that the same capability can be copied from one robot to multiple robots, and then expanded from one position or one park to more positions and parks.

The Chimelong Spaceship Park in Hengqin boasts 400,000 square meters of indoor space. Every day, the robots face dense crowds, complex lighting, noisy environments, as well as children, the elderly, foreign tourists, and speakers of various dialects.

Jiang Minling, Vice President of Chimelong Group and General Manager of Chimelong Hengqin Resort, explained that choosing an indoor amusement park as the first large-scale application scenario also took into account the current technological limitations. The robot's outdoor adaptability is still insufficient, and its application in rainy weather requires further research and development.

The real-world environment has prompted Logic to adjust its products.

Wang Chuang explained that the Expedition series has a battery life of 10 hours, while the industry average is about 3 hours. In amusement park settings, 10 hours of battery life can cover most of the operating hours, and usually only one battery swap is needed .

Faced with noisy environments, Zhiyuan has optimized the acoustic front end, algorithm noise reduction, multi-person recognition, and lip-reading recognition; the robot supports both Wi-Fi and dual 5G connections, and the park has also allocated a dedicated network slice for the robot .

The high density of people also raises safety requirements. The Expedition A3 incorporates 360-degree sensing; when the robot swings its arm, it will stop if someone suddenly enters its range of motion. Compliant joint control is used to reduce the force of accidental collisions. Wang Chuang also stated that personnel will be assigned to supervise the project during its initial deployment, and further improvements will be made based on operational data.

02 Tourists begin to alter products

The high-difficulty capabilities envisioned by the researchers may not correspond to the attractions that tourists like the most.

Wang Chuang observed on-site that tourists were likely queuing up for robot rock-paper-scissors, tic-tac-toe, and table tennis. These activities have simple rules, are highly interactive, and are suitable for children and families to enjoy together.

" Some things aren't necessarily more technically challenging for researchers to understand, but tourists do like them more ," he said.

In the next phase, Logic and Chimelong will continue to monitor the utilization rate and visitor feedback at each location. Projects with low visitor interest will be replaced, while newly developed motion, models, and interactive content will be redeployed to the park.

Xiong Yan also mentioned that the park will assess the number of users experiencing each robot. If the number of users starts to decline, the relevant programs will need to be adjusted or eliminated. Once the robots have general-purpose body and software capabilities, the cost of changing actions and program content is expected to be lower than building a new set of fixed equipment.

These operational feedbacks will also be incorporated into model updates .

In an interview, Wang Chuang gave an example: if a robot interacts with 1,000 tourists a day, it might find 100 failed responses. After iterating the model, the success rate for related questions will be observed to see if it can be improved .

Xiong Yan stated that after about a month of project deployment, the robot's interactive capabilities and adaptability to the explanation and tour environment have been continuously improving, relying on operational data, model adaptation, and capability updates .

A recent research report by Nomura estimates that the demand for high-quality physical interaction data will reach approximately 10 million hours in 2026, while the existing stock of high-quality data is about 500,000 hours. The report also notes that fault recovery data is highly valuable, and most enterprises have yet to establish a seamless feedback loop after deployment .

Citigroup's recent research on Mech-Mind provides another case study. Mech-Mind has deployed more than 30,000 3D vision systems, focusing on collecting "near miss" data in tasks, i.e. samples that almost failed, required intervention, or whose results deviated from expectations, in order to continue optimizing the model.

In this interview, Zhiyuan did not disclose in detail whether or in what form the data generated at Chimelong would be incorporated into the general model. What is clear is that site utilization, interaction failures, security interventions, and visitor feedback are being addressed in subsequent R&D and content adjustments .

03 Commercialization depends on operational costs

The robot needs to be continuously updated, and its operating costs also need to be calculated.

Currently, there are approximately 3 robots per staff member at Chimelong. Xiong Yan predicts that this situation may continue for several months, after which it will gradually shift to 10 robots per staff member, with the ideal goal of 20 robots per staff member .

Whether the human-robot ratio can be reduced depends on the robots' capabilities in autonomous onboarding and offboarding, group scheduling, safe operation, and remote maintenance. Calcium Wireless and Chimelong are jointly deploying an operation and maintenance system to reduce the number of on-site caregivers.

Wang Chuang also listed other costs that customers need to bear: purchase price, service life, network fees, token consumption, spare parts depletion, and routine maintenance. Whether the equipment is used for two or three years will directly affect the amortization of equipment costs.

Revenue also needs to be validated with operational data. Calcium hopes robots can improve the visitor experience, increase repeat visits and in-park spending; Chimelong, on the other hand, emphasizes the continuous updating of content and performance experiences.

Wang Chuang said that Zhiyuan will focus on how much cost the robots have increased for the park, and how much revenue they have brought. "Only when this thing gets better and better will our scale continue to expand."

Xiong Yan estimates that it may take another 3 to 5 years for robots to reach a state where they require no adjustments and can change environments like humans. This does not preclude robots from entering specific industries and continuing to improve their efficiency, user experience, and task capabilities through daily use.

The first production line determines how many robots can be produced. This "production line" at Chimelong, composed of real tourists, operators, and the R&D team, will test whether the robots can become more stable with use, whether the care costs can continue to decrease, and whether customers are willing to continue purchasing them.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Hard AI" . For more cutting-edge AI information, please go here.

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