With the support of independent innovative fleet collaborative operation technology, the unmanned press fleet cooperates tacitly to “press the road”; the visual language model equipped on the vehicle allows the mechanical equipment to not only understand the instructions, but also understand the scene… On March 30, at the Sany Group Science and Technology Festival Achievements Exhibition held in Changsha, Hunan, visitors were amazed by such shocking cutting-edge engineering machinery technology shows.
“New energy, electrification, intelligence, and unmanned technology are key technologies that will change the development of the future equipment industry. Increasing the research and development of related technologies is not a multiple-choice question for us, but a must-answer question.” On April 8, Li Hongwei, vice president of Sany Group and director of the R&D headquarters, said that it is certain that Sany Group will develop into an AI-native robot company in the future.
New situation: R&D supports global development
The Sany Jiangshan 636C heavy truck, which adopts the “Magic Pan” universal chassis design and integrates multiple innovative technologies such as dual-motor electric drive axles, 800V domain control platform, full air suspension and 636 kWh ultra-large bottom battery, ranks in the C position in the electrification achievements exhibition area.
In September last year, Jiangshan 636C obtained EU vehicle type certification and became my country’s first long-range electric tractor to be sold in batches to Europe. At the same time, this is also a typical case of Sany Group driving electric heavy trucks to break through long-haul trunk logistics scenarios with new productivity.
While using innovation to break the “boundary” of the industry’s anxiety about the battery life of electric heavy trucks, SANY Group has also driven the rapid development of the corporate economy with its pioneering electrification transformation innovation.
In 2025, the company’s electrified product sales will exceed 20 billion yuan, and its share in this field is far ahead.
At the Science and Technology Festival, Sany Group proposed the theme of “Innovating Science and Technology to Win the Future”.
The success of electrification transformation is precisely the first connotation of the word “new”: recognizing the new situation.
“Our overseas revenue accounts for half of our total revenue, and the group’s global development has entered an accelerated stage. Under this new situation, we must rely on continued high-quality research and development as core support to achieve our sustainable global development goals.” Li Hongwei said.
To this end, SANY Group has actively built an efficient global R&D network, established global R&D centers in Europe, the United States, Japan and other places, established innovation centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other places, and built multiple manufacturing bases overseas.
The company insists on investing 5% of its annual sales revenue into research and development.
Continuous investment in R&D allows SANY Group to successfully develop hundreds of new products and new technology projects every year.
New trend: starting the research and development of “intelligent unmanned collaboration”
A large coal mine project in Xinjiang is the first capacity contracting project that Sany Intelligent Mine has tried to operate.
For the project, Sany Intelligent Mining provides an overall solution for driverless transportation and builds core intelligent systems such as vehicles, control, perception, and dispatch.
To date, the project has operated for more than 220,000 kilometers, transported more than 2.22 million cubic meters of earth and stone, and achieved a full-time efficiency of over 90%. It provides a replicable and scalable demonstration path for the intelligent transformation of mines, and has also successfully verified the feasibility of driverless commercial operations.
As the world is in the “super technology window period” where the fourth industrial revolution and the third energy revolution overlap, Sany Group is actively trying to “embrace” all new technologies that can promote the collaborative development of intelligence and unmanned technologies.
Li Hongwei introduced that existing intelligent unmanned scenarios are mainly limited to certain types of closed areas. The overall collaborative efficiency of machinery has no outstanding comparative advantage compared with labor costs. The safety and reliability of intelligent machinery also needs to be improved.
“Currently achievable unmanned systems are still mainly driven by rules and algorithms rather than data,” he said.
In the unmanned future, human beings will only be planners of certain types of work scenarios.
Within the scene, all mechanical equipment is interconnected and driven by data to work autonomously.
This is the second level of “new” meaning that Sany Group is striving to pursue – launching the research and development of “intelligent unmanned collaboration”.
In addition to its domestic mine layout, SANY Group is also actively exploring unmanned operations in multiple overseas mines, trying to lay out everything from equipment to solutions, digital infrastructure and full operation management systems.
New Paradigm: Data-driven AI Native Innovation
In 2019, Sany Group launched a comprehensive digital transformation, spending tens of billions of yuan to upgrade traditional factories and create the industry benchmark Changsha No. 18 Smart Lighthouse Factory.
As of 2025, the company has built 35 smart/lighthouse factories around the world (including 3 world-class lighthouse factories), and has built the first 5G fully connected factory in the equipment manufacturing industry.
“In recent years, we have spent more than half of our R&D investment on the reserve and development of electronic intelligent technologies, especially the research and development of forward-looking and disruptive technologies that can achieve true unmanned operation, including actively exploring the future commercial application scenarios of these cutting-edge technologies.” Li Hongwei said.
In the continuous accumulation and iteration of technology, intelligent and unmanned technologies have been fully implemented in Sany Group.
The unmanned loader independently developed by the company has successfully been put into commercial operation, and the unmanned spreader press group has set an industry record for continuous operation in high-speed construction.
The group has also successively launched remote control equipment and intelligent construction machinery, and built full-scenario intelligent solutions such as smart mines and smart ports.
In the view of Sany Group, the unmanned development of construction machinery is an inevitable trend.
However, this “big project” not only needs to solve the problem of technical implementation, but also the problem of “economic applicability” of the technology: from the laboratory to the commercial application of unmanned cluster collaboration technology, it must have obvious cost advantages over existing manpower.
According to this, Sany is actively cooperating with artificial intelligence companies and university research institutes to jointly build a new ecological chain for unmanned construction machinery cluster collaboration, explore standard communication protocols and management models for unmanned construction machinery cluster collaboration, and try to create new business models such as “capacity contracting”.
“We are committed to launching a new research and development paradigm for the ‘new species’ of AI-native construction machinery, promoting the development of intelligence in the direction of true unmanning, and ‘evolving’ the ‘Sany Brain’ of construction machinery.” Li Hongwei said that SANY Group will actively challenge the research and development of technologies including algorithms and unmanned complex scenes, collect and build high-quality data sets of continuous working actions of construction machinery in different working conditions, and promote the establishment of industry standards.
Fu Weizhong, director of Sany Group, said that in the future, Sany Group will still adhere to the development strategy of “globalization, digital intelligence, and low carbonization” and will always regard R&D and innovation as the core engine for the company’s sustainable growth.
