The specialized robotics and embodied intelligence brand under NetEase, NetEase Lingdong, has achieved a significant operational milestone. Utilizing its "Lingzai" loader robots and "Lingjue" excavator robots, the company has established regular operations at over 100 project sites across more than ten provinces in China, with a cumulative total exceeding 700,000 safe task completions.
The company's technology is built on its proprietary "Mechanical Intelligence Core" training framework. This system overcomes the limitations of traditional custom algorithms, enabling autonomous operation without the need for extensive, costly modifications to existing work sites. Its applications are now deeply integrated into sectors including mining, concrete mixing stations, and ports.
Operational Efficiency and Impact
In national infrastructure projects, for instance, the Lingzai loader robot autonomously handles the entire workflow from loading and transporting materials to stockpiling and feeding. Its comprehensive operational efficiency reaches approximately 120% of that of a skilled human operator, while reducing overall energy consumption by about 15% and decreasing on-site personnel workload by up to 70%.
At the Huolinhe North Open-pit Coal Mine in Inner Mongolia, the Lingjue excavator robot has achieved a truck loading efficiency of around 80% compared to manual operation. Remarkably, it operates without human intervention for nearly 70% of its working time and has proven capable of functioning reliably in harsh conditions such as extreme cold and high dust environments, while maintaining compatibility with various equipment models.
Expansion into New Sectors
A notable development is the extension of the company's AI capabilities into smart agriculture. It has introduced an unmanned transfer solution for mushroom cultivation rooms, specifically addressing the hazardous issue of ammonia gas produced during the high-temperature mixing of chicken manure and straw for substrate preparation in double-spored mushroom farming.
Innovative Operational Models
Furthermore, NetEase Lingdong has pioneered a "Mixed Fleet" operational mode. This system allows for manned and unmanned vehicles to work together in coordinated groups, seamlessly integrating with existing, unmodified project vehicles. This approach continuously gathers valuable human-machine interaction data from real-world operations, which is then used to refine and improve the underlying algorithm models.
Simultaneously, the company has innovated with a "Shepherd" model within the industry. This shifts the loader operator from the vehicle cabin to a central monitoring and dispatch system. A single operator can now oversee multiple unmanned machines, enabling a fleet of autonomous vehicles to work in a coordinated group. Human intervention is only required under special or exceptional working conditions. To support broader industry advancement, NetEase Lingdong has open-sourced a terabyte-scale dataset of excavator operation videos alongside a dataset containing millions of human demonstration trajectories.
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