Staff Reporter |
Editor | Wen Shuqi
Around five or six years ago, NUPIAO made a deliberate move into AI. But as a company rooted in the optical sensing industry, they’ve never been one to rush things.
Since 2020, NUPIAO has developed three generations of quadruped intelligent inspection robots and has already landed some steady orders. In today’s crowded robot market, NUPIAO’s exploration into embodied intelligence remains focused on industrial mobile inspection, with quadruped robots as the primary platform. At the recent World Robot Conference, NUPIAO showcased its independently developed AQR200 quadruped intelligent inspection robot, designed to patrol substation environments.
Recently, NUPIAO’s Chairman, Jiang Mingwu, sat down for an exclusive interview with NUPIAO. In his view, this approach fits the scenarios they serve best and aligns with the company’s measured pace of business growth.
Jiang spent several years at Huawei and witnessed firsthand the long-term evolution of the “optical industry” in China. Before founding NUPIAO, the optical communications space was already crowded, but optical sensing still held enormous untapped potential. He notes that back then, most fiber optic sensors used by domestic companies came from overseas manufacturers. While university labs had produced plenty of research, bridging the gap to large-scale commercial application was still a steep climb.
Spotting that opportunity early, NUPIAO dedicated itself to the R&D and industrial application of fiber optic sensing technology, eventually listing on the STAR Market of the Shanghai Stock Exchange in 2023.
Interestingly, despite being part of the “light-based” tech wave, the recent boom in optical communications hasn’t directly translated into NUPIAO’s business. The company’s products are mainly deployed in offshore wind, power grids, utility tunnels, and structural health monitoring. Their fiber optic sensing systems and solutions provide the “sensory backbone” that keeps equipment safe and operations smart in these sectors.
Still, in recent years, the company has felt the profound shift AI is bringing.
With AI, the data collected through optical sensing devices can be mined far more deeply. Jiang explains to NUPIAO that, for instance, when monitoring vibration and acoustic signals in complex environments, valuable characteristic signals can easily get buried in background noise, dragging down recognition accuracy. AI’s enhanced algorithmic power can significantly boost that accuracy.
Moreover, since optical sensing is all about asset monitoring and maintenance, AI also elevates the level of intelligent operations. Jiang shares an example with NUPIAO: previously, an engineer at a client company needed years of hands-on experience to reach a high skill level. But with rapid AI iteration, the expertise of these “seasoned veterans” can be distilled, summarized, and embedded into NUPIAO’s Agents, helping newer engineers quickly master professional know-how and sharpen their on-site problem-solving abilities.
As for the embodied intelligence push over the past two years, it’s an innovative business born directly from real-world customer needs. Jiang doesn’t see it as a “cross-industry leap.”
In his view, fiber optic sensing is inherently about perceiving the physical world, but monitoring equipment tends to be stationary. In certain situations, clients need mobile monitoring, or want sensing devices that can be reused across locations rather than fixed installations. A quadruped robot dog can carry multiple sensing devices while roving for inspections—making it a natural fit for these enterprise needs.
Putting the “embodied intelligence” buzzword aside, NUPIAO actually introduced a rail-based inspection robot back in 2019. A few years later, when reinforcement learning started making breakthrough strides in quadruped locomotion control, Jiang saw it as a major turning point. That’s when NUPIAO ramped up its R&D investment in quadruped intelligent inspection robots.
Unlike many embodied intelligence players who start with tech and hunt for use cases, NUPIAO takes the opposite approach—building products from actual demands—which, in some ways, has accelerated their time-to-market. Since many of their clients operate in tough environments like mines and ports, a robot dog built for agility and movement is exactly what these businesses need.
Right now, the company’s quadruped robot dogs are already on duty at substations on remote islands. Jiang tells NUPIAO that substations are dense with equipment, have complex operational conditions, and include high-voltage areas—making manual inspections a heavy, high-risk chore. In the past, companies had to send staff to these sites frequently. But the robot dog can take over much of the repetitive on-site inspection work, reducing physical strain on workers and cutting down how often people need to enter high-risk zones.
In substation scenarios, the AQR200 quadruped intelligent inspection robot can be equipped with visible-light cameras, infrared thermal imagers, partial discharge detectors, and gas sensors. It captures images of transformers and switchgear, checks temperatures, and identifies equipment status—all while navigating autonomously and adapting to its surroundings.
That said, even in vertical niches, NUPIAO isn’t short on competition. According to QYResearch, the global intelligent quadruped robot dog market reached $316 million in sales in 2025 and is projected to hit $618 million by 2032. The competitive battleground has already shifted toward large-scale delivery.
Jiang, however, believes that compared to generic quadruped robots on the market, NUPIAO’s edge lies in years of accumulated industrial data, deep industry know-how, and a solid grasp of customer workflows. But they’re not limiting themselves to industrial clients only. Down the road, quadruped robot dogs could also find roles in lighter industrial and commercial settings—like guiding visitors or interacting with crowds in parks and exhibition halls.
Beyond the domain expertise, NUPIAO is effectively stepping into an entirely new arena, and the challenges are no less daunting than those facing a startup. NUPIAO has learned that the company is taking a fully in-house approach to its embodied intelligence business.
The hurdles aren’t just about iterating on technology. Jiang has weathered plenty of ups and downs in the optical industry, but compared to the familiar territory he knows well, he’s felt a distinct difference in this new venture: “Embodied intelligence is still in its infancy. A lot of the tech doesn’t have textbook solutions—you have to dig through research papers and hands-on practice to find answers, and the technical roadmap is still evolving rapidly.”
The second challenge he highlights is choosing the right direction. Jiang argues that as technology progresses, every company has its own goals and application focus. For NUPIAO, the starting point was mobile inspection, so they’ve been building from day one with the mindset of “getting the job done on-site.”
As for which product form and technical path will ultimately prevail, the entire industry is still figuring that out.
