Gui Zhongcheng, founder and chairman of Guimu Robot, revealed at the 2026 Yabuli Forum Summer Annual Meeting held in Chengdu from September 4th to 6th, that the company is the world's first to develop road CT robot products. He noted that a decade ago, there was no existing demand for such technology in the industry, making the judgment of market needs a critical hurdle when building the business from the ground up.
During the company's early preparation phase, Gui and his team consulted more than a dozen industry experts. One leading authority in the field directly dismissed the road CT concept, arguing that underground defects could simply be identified through visual inspection. "In my experience, it turns out that not everyone can recognize hidden risks, and even expert judgments are not always correct. In the first half of this year, this technology was formally incorporated into the national industry standard," Gui stated.
Gui emphasized that innovators in the technology sector should target global problems when selecting which issues to solve. "We live in an era of globalization. If a technological solution can be implemented worldwide, there is an opportunity to grow into a great enterprise," he said. He believes that distinguishing genuine demand from false demand requires applying first-principles thinking.
"I come from a robotics background, not civil engineering, but drawing on my experience in non-destructive testing from the machinery industry, I determined that road CT itself holds real value, even though the transportation sector had no such concept at the time. The core criterion is whether the matter has practical significance: being able to identify road hazards in advance is genuinely valuable from both safety and maintenance perspectives, so we persisted and deepened our work in this field for ten years," Gui explained.
Gui also cited BYD Co Ltd (SZSE: 002594) as a source of inspiration. He pointed out that BYD's electric vehicles are now highly competitive, but the company did not rise suddenly within a decade. Except for tires and glass, BYD has achieved self-developed and self-manufactured batteries, electronic controls, and motors, which has built its current core competitive moat. "We apply the same logic to road CT. Early on, when industrial conditions were immature, we were compelled to build a complete industry chain: independently developing core front-end detection instruments, investing in AI algorithm research five to six years ahead of schedule, and combining civil engineering expertise to refine our engineering application capabilities," Gui added.