The wheeled Nengzai No. 1 robot moved beyond a lab trial to battery-cell picking and loading on the Buick Electra E7 mass-production line in Shanghai.
Chinese Humanoids Editorial / Apr 2, 2026 / Independent industry intelligence
SAIC-GM put Nengzai No. 1, a wheeled robot based on AgiBot's A2-W, to work at its Ultium Center in Shanghai in March 2026. The robot handles high-precision battery-cell picking and loading on the Buick Electra E7 mass-production line.
SAIC says the system uses vision, coordinated dual-arm movement and force-controlled grasping to identify incoming cells and plan a grasp without fixed positioning. The automaker reports cumulative positioning accuracy of plus or minus 0.1 millimeters, a cycle of about two seconds per cell and a footprint below 15% of a conventional automated workstation.
Those figures are customer-reported, not independently audited. They nevertheless come from a named production line after SAIC-GM says it evaluated more than 100 workstations and ran nearly 1,000 tests. The evidence supports classifying this as an active production deployment rather than a demonstration.
Model naming needs care: the earlier source identifies an A2-W-based system, while April conference reporting calls the SAIC-GM platform G1 Max. The public accounts do not establish whether this is a rename or a distinct hardware revision. This record retains the original model attribution and stable identity; it does not count the same battery-line application twice.
A September 28 customer-hosted follow-up quotes a SAIC-GM engineer reporting nearly 80,000 completed workpieces and a stable 98% operating rate. The period and operating-rate definition are not published, so this is a customer-reported follow-up rather than audited availability.
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