The 2026 Industrial Machinery Industry Chain High-Quality Development Conference was held in Wuzhen, where experts discussed intelligent transformation

China News Service, Jiaxing, October 3 (Zhong Yu) How can the industrial mother machine industry achieve overtaking and leapfrog development? Zhou Ji, honorary chairman of the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society and academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, recently pointed out that focusing on the new generation of intelligent manufacturing and empowering CNC machine tools with a new generation of artificial intelligence is the technical route for the innovative development of my country's industrial machine tools.

He said: "We must firmly seize the historical opportunities of the new generation of intelligent manufacturing, promote the deep integration of new generation information technology such as artificial intelligence and manufacturing technology, and promote the advancement of industrial machinery towards intelligence and high-end."

The 2026 Industrial Machinery Industry Chain High-Quality Development Conference, hosted by the Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society and the International Intelligent Manufacturing Alliance, was recently held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang. A number of academicians and experts, university scholars and business representatives discussed topics such as key core technology research on industrial machine tools, collaborative innovation of the industrial chain, and intelligent transformation.

"Industrial machines are the basic equipment of the manufacturing industry and an important strategic foundation to support the construction of a modern industrial system. The development level of a country's manufacturing industry depends largely on the technical level and industrial capabilities of industrial machines." Lin Zhongqin, chairman of the Chinese Society of Mechanical Engineering and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that in the face of a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, promoting the development of industrial machines to high-end, intelligent and green, and accelerating the improvement of the resilience and safety level of the industrial chain and supply chain are important tasks in building a manufacturing power.

Xu Zhengyang, professor and vice president of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, told China News: "Artificial intelligence has deeply empowered the development of industrial machine tools and played an important role in the forward design, iterative optimization, assembly manufacturing, operation and maintenance of machine tool equipment." He gave an example. Tool design for electrochemical processing usually relies on repeated revisions based on manual experience. The production preparation cycle is long, and single-piece or small batch production is not cost-effective. With the introduction of artificial intelligence, tool electrode design is faster and more efficient. The production preparation cycle of electrochemical manufacturing has been greatly shortened, and the adaptability to processing and manufacturing has also been significantly improved.

In recent years, the independent innovation capabilities of my country's industrial mother machine industry have been continuously enhanced. A number of key enterprises continue to strengthen technological innovation, a number of universities and scientific research institutions continue to make breakthroughs in key technologies, and a number of major equipment and core components have achieved innovative development.

At the Industrial Machinery and Key Components Exhibition held at the same time, reporters saw in the exhibition area that the mobile five-axis parallel processing robot developed by the team of Liu Xinjun, a tenured professor at Tsinghua University, was demonstrating operations. Liu Xinjun introduced that this product does not follow the mainstream series mechanism, but uses a parallel mechanism to achieve more flexible, mobile and high-precision operations. At present, this technology has been implemented and applied in the efficient and high-quality manufacturing of large and complex structural parts in aerospace, new energy, transportation and other industries.

"Artificial intelligence empowerment is not only applicable to high-end equipment, but also medium and low-end equipment with large quantities and wide range can also benefit." Chen Xin, director of the National Technology Innovation Center of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area and academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, believes that in the intelligent era, there is huge room for the modernization of my country's manufacturing and industry, and small and medium-sized enterprises also have great potential. However, the wide range of scenarios requires small and medium-sized enterprises to keep up with the times, from local intelligence to overall intelligence, and gradually improve process adaptive intelligence and quality adaptive intelligence.

At the same time, the industrial machine itself is changing. Tan Liwu, a professor at the University of Macau and chairman of the Macau Institute of Development and Quality, believes that the new generation of intelligent manufacturing is promoting the transformation of industrial machines from completing processing to sensing analysis and feedback of processing status. Future machine tools not only need to have processing capabilities, but also need to sense their own operating status and use data to help users determine whether the processing process is stable. This change helps to gradually shift the machining process from experience-driven to data-driven.

"The field of industrial mother machines is a long-term, systematic project that involves basic materials, core components, advanced manufacturing processes, CNC systems, intelligent technology and other fields. It requires collaboration between the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain and deep integration of the innovation chain, technology chain, talent chain and industrial chain." Lin Zhongqin said.

He pointed out that first, we must adhere to innovation-driven development, strengthen basic research and key core technology research; second, adhere to industrial collaboration, and promote upstream and downstream enterprises to form a development pattern of complementary advantages and win-win cooperation; third, adhere to talent leadership, strengthen the training of young scientific and technological talents, and build a high-level engineering and technical talent team; fourth, adhere to open cooperation, gather global innovation resources, and jointly promote high-quality development of the manufacturing industry.