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Source: People's Republic of China in Russian – People's Republic of China in Russian –
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Source: People's Republic of China – State Council News
CHONGQING, July 7 (Xinhua) — A week after the official opening of a new section of the Chongqing-Xiamen high-speed railway, a key transportation hub on the route, Chongqing East Railway Station in southwest China, has been put into operation.
From the receipt of design documents in May 2022 to the official opening of the facility, it took 38 months to complete the largest high-speed railway station in western China. Behind this grandiose project are the heroes left behind the scenes – robots.
According to Sun Haoran, project manager for the station from China Railway Construction Engineering Group (CRCEG), the station serves as a pilot project for “integrating a station into an urban environment” as part of the country’s efforts to strengthen transportation infrastructure.
Located in Nan'an District of Chongqing, the station has 15 platforms and 29 tracks. The eight-story station building occupies a total construction area of 1.22 million square meters, equivalent to 170 standard football fields. The roof area of the facility is about 120,000 square meters, and its weight reaches 16,500 tons.
“The scale of the station roof alone is colossal, making the construction complex and associated with high safety risks,” Sun Haoran said.
Indeed, in this city, where temperatures regularly reach 40 degrees Celsius during the scorching summer sun, building a large-scale transport hub on difficult terrain requires innovation.
Robots have made a quiet revolution, transforming traditional construction work in extreme conditions.
"Leveling the surface in 40-degree heat used to result in workers fainting from heatstroke," said Huang Pingqing, a project manager at the 11th Bureau of China Railway.
“Now laser robots perform this work with millimetre accuracy three times faster than a human, reducing labour costs by 40 percent,” he added.
“At the same time, in this mountainous area, which is as hot as a furnace in the summer, steel does not sweat,” he added, and proudly presented his “robotic army.”
Four-wheeled laser leveling machines equipped with lidar, AI algorithms and 5G connectivity have replaced manual concrete leveling. While workers remotely monitor them from cool shelters, the robots’ precision work reduces waste.
Patrol robots, regardless of night or rain, work around the clock. Using AI vision, they detect the absence of helmets or incorrectly parked cars within a radius of 100 meters during the day or 50 meters at night, reducing the time to detect violations by 90 percent and increasing the efficiency of quality control by four times, he noted.
Glass installation robots handle 800-kilogram panels for high-rise facades. Precision servo drives position massive glass units with millimeter accuracy, speeding up installation three times and reducing the risk of accidents by 90 percent compared to the manual lifting of giant glass units by dozens of workers.
All-round welding robots were used to join overhead pipelines. Capable of controlling movement with an accuracy of 0.1 mm, they sealed the joint of an 800 mm diameter steel pipe in two hours – three times faster than the manual method – ensuring consistent quality of work carried out at height.
“Robots free our teams from working in unbearable heat,” Huang Pingqing emphasized. “They are not just something, but important and irreplaceable partners.”
Data from the 11th Bureau of China Railway Corporation confirmed that robotics has tripled average labor productivity and nearly halved labor costs.
In addition, safety-related accidents have been reduced by 90 percent, despite summer heat waves regularly testing the limits of construction capabilities in the city's challenging terrain, including record temperatures in 2022 and 2024 that saw traditional construction sites suspend work during daylight hours.
“This is how technology serves people – building faster, safer and smarter even in Chongqing’s ‘firebox,’” Huang Pinqing said.
The mountainous metropolis is also accelerating its adoption of automation to transform infrastructure development and beyond.
According to the Chongqing Economic and Information Technology Commission, in recent years the city has developed action plans to promote the application of robots and develop future industries, laying the institutional foundation for the development of the robotics industry.
By 2024, the city's robot production capacity exceeded 60,000 units, and the total output value of the entire production chain exceeded 37 billion yuan (about 5.17 billion US dollars).
At the same time, the city is forming a cluster of intelligent equipment that is internationally competitive.
At present, Chongqing has gathered more than 300 key robotics enterprises and established 31 R&D platforms, including the Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Robotics Testing Center.
This has resulted in the creation of a comprehensive ecosystem covering R&D, manufacturing, testing, systems integration, component supply, training and application services. -0-
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