The National Steel Structure Quality Inspection and Testing Center of MCC Building Research Institute and Beijing XIAOYUBOT Technology Co. Ltd. on Tuesday inaugurated a joint laboratory for industrial embodied intelligent welding and testing.
Zeng Bin, president of the China Steel Structure Association and chief scientist at China Minmetals; Wang Haitao, party secretary and general manager of MCC Building Research Institute; Liu Dong, party secretary and chairman of MCC Testing and Certification; and Qiao Zhongliang, founder and CEO of XIAOYUBOT, unveiled the laboratory.
Qiao said in remarks that embodied intelligence is developing rapidly, but quality must remain the bottom line. “Every weld concerns engineering safety and human life. Robots can weld faster, but if quality fails, higher efficiency means greater risk,” he said.
The inspection center is the only national-level quality inspection center in China’s steel-structure sector. Its welding team led the drafting of more than 100 standards, including the Code for Welding of Steel Structures, and trained China’s first WorldSkills welding gold medalist. Qiao said the partnership aims to fully connect process R&D for intelligent equipment with national-level quality verification on one platform. “Every weld must be inspectable, traceable and stand up to the strictest yardstick,” he said.
Qiao disclosed the company’s first customer case on Oct 26: 12 XIAOYUBOT Future robots are in daily operation at a workshop of state-owned Beipao Light Steel. Based on August 2026 data, monthly capacity rose 30% from before the upgrade, overall costs fell 49% at equivalent welding quality, and each machine produced about 90 meters of equivalent fillet weld per day. He said embodied intelligence is “no longer a proposition to be argued but a fact that has already happened,” adding that robots take on dangerous, arduous and repetitive work and put people in more dignified positions.
At the ceremony, Zhou Shuchun, head coach of China’s national welding team for WorldSkills, and Zhao Qiansen, gold medalist in welding at the 48th WorldSkills Competition, were appointed expert committee members. Zhou, who has coached four WorldSkills champions, said: “Craftsmanship remains unchanged; what changes is the tool in our hands. Chinese welders have welded the world; the next generation must take Chinese robots to weld the world again.” Zhao won gold in Shanghai in September with the highest score in the event’s history, China’s fourth WorldSkills welding gold. “We must carry the baton forward and win the gold in embodied-era welding skills,” he said.
Qiao said inviting master craftsmen aims to turn craftsmanship, skills and experience into a transferable process base and train a new generation of welders who understand both processes and AI. “The lab connects decades of deep accumulation in Chinese welding processes with the powerful future of AI,” he said.
Founded in 2023, XIAOYUBOT develops a “one brain, multiple forms” general-purpose robot brain and industrial applications, aiming to make intelligent labor an infrastructure accessible to all and ubiquitous. In July 2026, it launched its first product, the XIAOYUBOT Future robot, equipped with Nvidia’s Orin computing platform and Mech-Mind 3D cameras, with absolute positioning accuracy of 0.5 mm and a self-developed spatial positioning pen for “draw-to-weld,” teaching-free operation.
The laboratory will use national steel-structure testing standards as a rigid benchmark to develop embodied robot welding processes, conduct sample testing and performance verification, and train interdisciplinary welding talent, making embodied welding safe, stable, precise, reliable and fully inspectable. The move marks a key leap from data validation on customer production lines to standard-setting at a national testing platform, and from a frontier technology concept to industrial-grade infrastructure.
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