Robotic lidar applications drive RoboSense sales boom

RoboSense, the Shenzhen-headquartered manufacturer of lidar technology, has reported a surge in unit shipments in the first three months of 2026, driven largely by robotics applications.

Regularly ranked by analyst company Yole Group as one of the leading providers of lidar hardware for advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and industrial deployments, RoboSense said it sold just over 330,000 units in the opening quarter of the year - more than three times the total for the same period in 2025.

Robotics applications accounted for more than 185,000 of those sales, exceeding ADAS volumes for the first time after surging by more than an order of magnitude.

The company claims to have secured the top position across five key segments: robotic lawn mowers, autonomous delivery, humanoid robots, embodied AI, and commercial cleaning robots.

VCSEL architecture

RoboSense also says that it is the only technology company worldwide to achieve AEC-Q automotive-grade certification for its fully self-developed lidar chipsets, spanning transmission, reception, and processing.

“By leveraging its proprietary SPAD-SoC and VCSEL chip architecture, the company has established the industry's most comprehensive portfolio of digital lidar products, which have already achieved mass production, covering low-beam to high-beam specifications and meeting diverse requirements for both automotive and robotics applications,” boasts the firm.

“Backed by its core technological advantages, RoboSense is accelerating the development of a dual-engine growth model driven by both automotive and robotics businesses, continuously advancing intelligent innovation in the global automotive and robotics industries.”

The firm’s latest update comes just a couple of weeks after it reported annual sales of ¥1.94 billion (approximately $280 million) in 2025, up 18 per cent on the total for 2024 as it swung to profitability for the first time in the December quarter and shipped 912,000 units during the year.

In their outlook for 2026, the RoboSense CEO Mark Qiu and his management team stated: “We expect the revenue from ADAS business sector will maintain strong growth. At the same time, revenue from [the] robotics business sector will enter into another year of significant growth, and we anticipate that RoboSense will again lead the industry in sales volume across the general robotics market in 2026.

“In terms of production capacity, we have completed building up [our] annual production capacity for 4 million lidar units, which would sufficiently match the ramp-up needs of both ADAS and robotics businesses and fully ensure large-scale product deliveries in 2026."

While RoboSense now positions itself as a robotics company, Qiu added: "Our ultimate vision is to make lidar a ubiquitous category, as essential and ever-present as the common camera."