Quicktron Robotics (快仓智能), China’s leading AMR builder, held a ceremony on June 26 to celebrate the operation of its new plant in northern China’s Weifang as its first autonomous forklift rolled off the production line.
Through commands sent via a remote controller, the forklift can complete tasks like material handling, delivery, onloading and offloading and palletizing, all on its own.
The new factory is a result of a strategic collaboration agreement Quicktron signed in August last year with Weicheng District of Weifang, a city in northern China’s Shandong Province.
The two sides pledged efforts to construct a production facility for Quicktron to churn out smart warehouse robots, primarily self-guided forklift and bin-handling robot.
Upon completion, the Weifang plant has an estimated annual capacity of more than 10,000 units, recording revenue of 500 million yuan (US$69.27 million) a year.
“We chose to build a production base here for smart robots, hoping to lead high-quality growth of an entire industrial ecosystem through the manufacturing and application of smart robots,” said Yang Wei, founder and CEO of Quicktron.
He added that an ecosystem will attract upstream suppliers of components like lidar, while empowering the automation drive of downstream segments such as automobile and 3C.
“(The goal) is to build a number of exemplary intelligent factories in Weifang,” Yang explained.
Quicktron, founded in 2014, is a pioneer in producing AI-driven robotics. It is recognized as a unicorn and a national-level high-tech firm.
Weifang in recent years has offered a series of incentives to woo firms with cutting-edge technologies to settle down in the city.
For instance, it built a semiconductor park, a smart robot production base and a maglev train production facility. A number of companies have since moved in.
In the first five months of this year, the city’s industrial businesses with an annual revenue of 20 million yuan and more gained 3.6% in output.
Besides, the city also signed agreements for 33 projects with sums exceeding 100 million yuan, totaling a contract value of 30.4 billion yuan.
