Chongqing — During the Spring Festival holiday—when millions across China traveled home—one question stood out: who keeps the factories running? In some plants, automated production lines and machines that don’t take time off helped operations continue smoothly.
At a Lynk & Co. plant in Chengdu, an AI agent developed by GYMD Digital Technology Co., Ltd. is enhancing equipment inspections and production planning. In hazardous industrial zones, explosion-proof robots from Sevnce Robotics Co., Ltd. patrol facilities like natural gas plants, helping workers identify and mitigate potential safety risks.
Sevnce robotics patrolled an industrial site, conducting safety inspections with onboard cameras and sensors. (Photo/Chongqing Daily)
These AI-powered solutions come from two Chongqing-based companies. Both systems are designed to learn from historical factory data, including repair requests, maintenance logs, and previous anomaly reports, enabling them to pinpoint likely causes of issues and suggest next steps. This is crucial in high-throughput manufacturing, where delays in problem diagnosis can lead to costly downtime, and technicians must often piece together information from various sources.
These tools allow for 24-hour monitoring, shifting routine checks away from manual inspections and freeing up staff to focus on interpreting alerts and making decisions.
Rather than beginning the day with a walk through the workshop, inspectors can now start at a screen, entering commands to prompt the system to retrieve task progress, flag abnormal indicators, and highlight relevant fault reports.
On the safety side, Sevnce Robotics has deployed explosion-proof robots to patrol hazardous industrial areas, including natural gas facilities. Equipped with high-definition cameras, gas sensors, and infrared thermal imaging, the robots operate continuously to monitor equipment, detect leaks, and assess gas concentrations.
The company reports that robotic patrols have increased inspection efficiency by over 70% and reduced manual inspection workloads by more than 60%, positioning the technology as a means to minimize exposure while keeping operations running during the holiday season.
Originally developed to assist with equipment inspections, GYMD’s AI agent has now been deployed across 18 Geely Group production bases, with its capabilities expanding to include production scheduling during peak periods such as the holiday season.
According to the company, a process that once took four to six hours to finalize can now be completed in just over 10 minutes, once demand inputs are entered, generating multiple scheduling options for managers.