XIAOYUBOT and a national steel inspection center open an embodied-AI welding lab

XIAOYUBOT and MCC's national steel inspection center have opened a joint lab to make embodied-AI welding nationally testable.

Beijing XIAOYUBOT and the National Steel Structure Quality Inspection and Testing Center of MCC Building Research Institute have opened a joint laboratory for industrial embodied-AI welding and testing, inaugurated on Tuesday. The point of the pairing is to tie intelligent welding equipment development to national-level quality verification on a single platform, so that every weld produced by a robot can be inspected, traced, and measured against national steel-structure standards.

The first customer evidence was disclosed at the ceremony. Twelve 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 percent after the upgrade, overall costs fell 49 percent at equivalent welding quality, and each machine produced about 90 meters of equivalent fillet weld per day. These are company-disclosed figures from the ceremony, not independently verified results.

Welding is a demanding first proving ground for embodied AI because speed alone is not a win: a robot can weld faster than a person, but a failed weld is an engineering-safety failure. The lab will develop welding processes, run sample testing and performance verification, and train a generation of welders who understand both the craft and the AI driving the torch.

XIAOYUBOT, founded in 2023, builds a "one brain, multiple forms" general-purpose robot brain for industrial work. Its Future robot, launched in July 2026, runs on an Nvidia Orin computing platform with Mech-Mind 3D cameras, reaches 0.5 mm absolute positioning accuracy, and uses a spatial positioning pen for teaching-free draw-to-weld operation. The new lab moves the company from proving its robots on customer production lines to helping set the standard those lines are judged against.