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26 Feb 2025
Manufacturer Humanoid Robot intends Qinglong for general purpose use and open source development.
China's RoboSense lidar company has announced the production of its millionth lidar unit, supplied to robotics developer Humanoid Robot (Shanghai).This milestone marks RoboSense as the first company in the world to achieve the production of one million high-beam lidar units, said the firm.
The RoboSense E1R lidar unit is described as a fully solid-state digital lidar based on the company's automotive-grade E platform, equipped with a 120° by 90° field of view and proprietary solid-state architecture.
The automotive sector has been increasingly significant for RoboSense, which previously announced rising demand for its systems from car companies and has been identified as a major contributor to the ascendence of Chinese lidar suppliers within the automotive space.
Humanoid Robot (Shanghai) is one of RoboSense's partners in the humanoid robotics industry, with the supply of E1R and accompanying technical support intended to accelerate the development and deployment of its Qinglong robot for various multi-scenario tasks. And Shanghai is a focal point for China's development of the robots, with the country's first training center for such devices opening there earlier in 2025. Humanoid Robot (Shanghai) itself forms part of the National and Local Co-Built Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center.
"Congratulations to RoboSense on the production of its one millionth lidar," commented Xing Boyang, R&D Director of the Humanoid Robot (Shanghai). "The National and Local Co-Built Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center has already adopted RoboSense's E1R for collaborative product development on the Qinglong humanoid robot's public version."
Qinglong was unveiled arranging bread and fruit at Shanghai's World Artificial Intelligence Conference in July 2024, where it marked China’s entry into the advanced field of full-sized general-purpose humanoid robots.
The robot is supported by an open-source initiative, making its hardware structure and parameters available to other developers as a way to accelerate innovation, collaboration, and development within the global robotics and AI communities, potentially driving advancements in a range of industries.
Robots on the rise
Advances in lidar platforms have been enthusiastically adopted by developers of automated vision systems and industrial robots, alongside the technology's place in autonomous vehicles.
Already in 2025 researchers have incorporated lidar into a robotic system intended for use in hazardous environments such as flooding or chemical plant emergencies, and developed a single-photon detector able to boost the ability of lidar to image objects at long distances, potentially in the 10-kilometer range.
Since the beginning of 2025 the AI robotics industry, as represented by humanoid robots, has experienced rapid growth and is expected to usher in large-scale commercial applications. RoboSense launched its own robotics platform strategy to position itself for this market, intending to be a "robotics technology platform company" providing incremental components and solutions for the AI robotics industry.
At the same time RoboSense unveiled its first batch of robotics lidar products such as the E1R and the Airy, described as "the world’s first 192-beam hemispherical digital lidar for robotics."
Humanoid Robot (Shanghai) has said that it foresees being equipped to train 1,000 robots like Qinglong or other similar models simultaneously by 2027, readying them for their real-world deployment.
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