ZhiXing Robot Takes On Lacquer Fan Craft at Hong Kong Mid-Autumn Lantern Fair

Hong Kong's first International Mid-Autumn Lantern Festival runs from September 17 to 27 at Victoria Park, themed around reunion. It brings together feature lanterns from 20 countries and regions, Nanjing Qinhuai lanterns from China's national intangible cultural heritage list, and local Hong Kong lantern craftsmanship.

ZhiXing Robot has been invited to appear, performing a demonstration in which a robot makes lacquer fans.

Lacquer fan making is a traditional intangible heritage craft: the fan surface is dipped into lacquer liquid and then rotated and dyed to form richly layered patterns. Each dip yields a distinct grain.

The process demands considerable manual skill. The force used to pick up the fan, the depth of the dip, the speed of rotation and the angle of the dyeing each shape the final result.

At the venue, ZhiXing's general-purpose wheeled humanoid robot Hanyue becomes a modern artisan, using in-house precision force control, 3D visual perception and adaptive grasping to complete the full sequence — picking up the fan, dipping it in lacquer, spinning it and dyeing patterns. Mechanical precision meets the Eastern poetry of lacquer art.

The technical difficulty lies in the fact that no single motion in the craft is standardized. The lacquer liquid has viscosity, the fan surface has grain, and different dip angles and speeds produce different patterns.

To replicate the craft, the robot cannot rely on preset trajectories. It must use force control to sense the resistance of the lacquer and the feedback from the fan, 3D vision to judge position and angle, and adaptive grasping to adjust pressure.

ZhiXing Robot concentrates on robotic grasping and embodied intelligence. Backed by its three core technologies — mechanical intelligence, perceptual intelligence and drive-control intelligence — it holds more than 200 independent intellectual property rights, with products deployed in aerospace, precision manufacturing, research and education. The lacquer fan performance puts its end-effector and force-control capabilities into a non-industrial setting.