World’s First Intelligent Agent Factory Defines Self-Optimizing Smart Manufacturing
A new milestone in smart manufacturing has been reached in China. Midea Group’s Jingzhou washing machine factory has been officially certified by London-based World Record Certification Agency (WRCA) as the world’s first intelligent agent factory covering multiple manufacturing scenarios. The certification marks not only a breakthrough for Midea but also a significant shift in how global manufacturing may evolve in the age of AI-driven digital ecosystems.
From Digital Factories to Intelligent Agent Ecosystems
At the heart of the Jingzhou site’s recognition is its adoption of a multi-agent collaborative architecture – 14 intelligent agents deployed across 38 core production scenarios, all orchestrated by Midea’s proprietary ‘Factory Brain’. This system integrates the company’s decades of manufacturing expertise with large AI models and embodied robotics, enabling true end-to-end capabilities: perception, decision-making, execution, feedback, and continuous optimization.
Performance results highlight the disruptive potential: tasks that once took human operators hours are now executed in seconds, delivering efficiency gains exceeding 80%. Production scheduling responsiveness alone has increased by 90%.
Following on-site verification, technical audits, and data validation, WRCA’s certification committee concluded that Midea has pioneered a new production logic. Unlike conventional digital factories, Jingzhou represents an autonomous, self-evolving ecosystem where intelligent agents manage energy, production, quality, and maintenance across the entire plant.
“This certification not only confirms Midea’s position as the first manufacturer to scale multi-agent intelligent operations across diverse production scenarios,” said WRCA certification officer, “but also sets a global benchmark for efficiency, resilience, and adaptability in smart manufacturing ecosystems.”
The Factory Brain: AI at the Core of Production
Midea describes the intelligent agent factory as a ‘new species.’ Each production element, workers, machines, materials, methods, and environments, is no longer isolated but connected through the Factory Brain. Intelligent devices such as embodied robots, AMRs, injection machines, cameras, and sensors are empowered with perception, reasoning, and action capabilities.
The Factory Brain itself acts as the neural hub, leveraging distributed multi-agent architecture and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication. Integrated industrial large-model inference engines enhance decision-making. In practice, this translates to tangible quality and inspection improvements:
- AI-augmented visual inspection has reduced first-article inspection from 15 minutes to just 30 seconds.
- Collaborative robots dynamically adapt assembly tasks to mixed production lines, performing like flexible human operators.
This synergy of AI, robotics, and domain expertise redefines what real-time, adaptive manufacturing looks like.
Embodied Intelligence: Closing the Last Mile Toward Dark Factories
Midea is also addressing the ‘last mile’ of automation with embodied robotics. Its humanoid robot, MELLO, developed in-house, now executes frequent, high-precision tasks such as first inspections, TPM checks, and EHS compliance patrols. By integrating multimodal sensing and embodied intelligence, MELLO autonomously transports components, performs dimensional and visual inspection with in-house 3D vision, and feeds data directly into the quality agent for real-time decision-making.
Supporting robots such as the ‘Yutu’ AI inspection robot extend capabilities further, using vision-language-action (VLA) models to autonomously navigate, diagnose, and act across multiple tasks – achieving inspection cycle frequencies double those of human operators.
Beyond humanoids, Jingzhou also operates a fleet of 81 AMRs in its injection workshop. Controlled by the Factory Brain, these mobile robots execute dynamic routing, obstacle avoidance, and material transport with traffic-like orchestration—ensuring uninterrupted intralogistics without congestion.
Redefining Standards for Global Manufacturing
Midea executives emphasize that the intelligent agent factory is not an isolated showcase but a replicable paradigm. The group plans to expand intelligent agent coverage across more scenarios, integrate additional embodied devices, and rapidly scale the solution to its global factories.
“While humanoid robotics are still in their exploratory stage,” said Midea CTO Wei Chang, “our applications demonstrate that, under the unified scheduling of the Factory Brain, embodied robots and intelligent agents can achieve coordinated operations—delivering higher efficiency and creating the foundation for fully autonomous factories.”
Industry experts suggest that Jingzhou’s intelligent agent factory marks a strategic leap for Chinese manufacturing, moving from following to defining global smart manufacturing standards. The model demonstrates a new paradigm where system autonomy replaces operator dependence, and real-time optimization supersedes corrective intervention.
For metrology and quality control, the implications are profound: inspection tasks become seamlessly integrated within the production loop, shifting from isolated checkpoints to AI-driven closed-loop systems. This not only accelerates quality assurance but also ensures resilience and adaptability in increasingly complex manufacturing environments.
Toward a New Era of Smart Manufacturing
With WRCA certification, Midea’s Jingzhou facility represents more than a landmark in manufacturing – it is a living prototype of the future factory. By proving that AI agents, embodied robotics, and digital brains can operate across dozens of production and quality scenarios, Midea has provided a reusable blueprint for the global industry.
The intelligent agent factory paradigm promises ‘lights-out’ manufacturing that is not only automated but also self-optimizing, ushering in a new era where manufacturing intelligence is as important as physical infrastructure.
