Justin Strong

China, day 5.5 I headed to a robotics sensor factory tour at Guangzhou Lianhe Technology Development. We first looked at the assembly line where workers were soldering, assembling and testing devices. Ventilation is very important to draw out the fumes from soldering and ensure that the product is not contaminated. They spend a lot of time inspecting the assembly line to keep it up to international standards. They have many assembly lines and are adding more capacity soon on another floor under construction. Next we went to the SMT line. Before entering we put plastic on our shoes to keep this room clean. These machines are extremely precise and fast at placing components onto PCBs. Each raw board rides down a conveyor belt where the machine places chips and components. Chips and components are in a big roll that feeds into it almost like a printer, except it costs millions. At the end of the conveyor belt is a QC inspector who ensures the board is done correct, then it gets placed into another belt in what is effectively a large oven that bakes the chips on. The SMP machines are very expensive, so it’s usually run at a lower speed but 24/7 to reduce wear. Lots of effort is put into ensuring the quality is high here. There are special faraday cage stations too where they can test anything with a radio to ensure it’s rf performance is correct without interference. They have made their own battery charge and discharge machine for testing the batteries and spread out around the factory they have many QC rooms. They also have their own in house engineering team. They have helped many companies go 0 to 1 on products and some of those companies are now producing millions of units with them. Their engineering teams can do mechanical, electrical, firmware etc, more or less everything needed to build a product and they can even scale up the engineering team very quickly with the great supply of engineers in the area.

China, day 4.5 We toured an actuator factory at @tcdrive2012. The manufacturing line was almost like a clean room, we had to put on factory scrubs, our shoes were shrink wrapped in a special machine and then we passed thru a chamber where the air was blown out and replaced with new air to prevent contamination. Their manufacturing process is proprietary so we weren’t allowed to film everywhere. They took us thru each station in the assembly line and explained what they are doing. I was surprised at the workers slow speed, they seemed more concerned with producing a quality product than doing it fast. About a third of the factory/stations were dedicated to various communication, precision, noise and others quality controls. I was allowed to film in the testing room were they had built a custom rig to measure the accuracy while moving weights around. Notice how each actuator and arm sits on a MASSIVE inch thick pipe and plate stand. Extremely thick metal like this is used in high precision applications(for example, CNC machines) to prevent any flex. This lets their test stand have extreme high sensitivity/precision. They didn’t even call it out, but I was very impressed with their attention to detail. They had more rooms for R&D. They let us photo some arms and humanoids they built for marketing. One customer had a humanoid partially assembled in the factory that I wasn’t allowed to photograph.

Day 1 of Shenzhen robot travels We landed at midnight in Shenzhen Airport. We found this cafe run by robots at the rideshare hailing area. A pair of arms can make you a coffee and the Galbot will deliver it to the window, but it was closed when we saw it at 2am. China is already proving to be on another scale, there were thousands of people in the cavernous airport and the Ride-hailing area had hundreds of people waiting. Our midnight landing made it hard to see more robots, what do you think we’ll see tomorrow?

Hello Shenzhen from SF I am a robotics founder visiting from oct 29th to nov 8th. I’m hoping to meet - people in robotics - hardware folks - researchers - data people - builders - factories If your in Shenzhen let’s connect, I’ll bring you an ESP32 and a coffee