Swancor Advanced Materials announces entry into the personal robot market, officially launches "Qiyuan Q1"

On December 31, 2025, Swancor Advanced Materials Chairman Peng Zhihui — better known online as "Zhihuijun" — unveiled the Qiyuan Q1, billed as the world’s first small humanoid robot with full-body force control, and said the company will enter the personal-robot market under the Swancor Qiyuan brand. The device breaks new ground in joint design, footprint and use cases, compressing lab-grade humanoid capabilities into a backpack-sized form.

Image source: Swancor Qiyuan

The Qiyuan Q1’s core breakthrough tackles a long-standing challenge: miniaturizing high-performance humanoid joints. Combining advances in materials, mechanical design and control algorithms, Swancor Qiyuan compresses a QDD quasi-direct-drive joint to a volume "smaller than an egg" — yet preserves the force-control fidelity and high dynamic response of full-size machines, enabling what it calls the world’s first small humanoid with full-body force control. With force sensors on every joint, the robot can perceive external forces in real time and respond compliantly, laying the groundwork for safe physical human–robot interaction.

The Qiyuan Q1 targets three scenarios — research, creative tinkering and the home. For researchers, it offers fully open SDK and HDK interfaces and rugged, low-wear characteristics, creating a portable testbed for embodied-intelligence work. For hobbyists, its modular architecture supports 3D-printed customization and behavior-logic editing, lowering the barrier to robot creation. And for households, natural-language interaction paired with compliant impedance control enables services such as English practice and knowledge Q&A. That approach cuts the cost of trial-and-error in R&D and narrows the sim-to-real gap.

The launch marks a pivotal step in Swancor Advanced Materials' strategic shift. After Zhiyuan Robotics took a controlling stake in November 2025, Peng Zhihui moved quickly to become chairman and, within two months, brought the company's first embodied-intelligence product to market — signaling a full pivot from materials to robotics. As embodied intelligence races toward a market worth hundreds of billions, the Qiyuan Q1's "small size + force control" combination stakes out a new path into personal robots — and offers a fresh route to commercialization.