China’s two biggest makers of lidar sensors for cars, Hesai Group and RoboSense Technology, have ramped up investments in robotics products as the country consolidates its leading position in building a global supply chain for the fast-growing sector.

Shanghai-based Hesai, the world’s largest producer of lidar sensors that help cars map terrain, planned to spend 200 million yuan (US$28.9 million) this year to design and manufacture “eyes and muscles” for robots, creating a new growth engine after it reported solid earnings for 2025, according to chief financial officer Andrew Fan.

“With the rapid development of large language models over the past two years, business leaders have reached a consensus that the robotics industry is on the cusp of truly entering the commercialisation phase,” he told the South China Morning Post on Wednesday. “We will make substantial investment this year to expand our robotics segment.”

Fan added that Hesai would unveil its technologies and products designed for robots in April.

Short for “light detection and ranging”, lidar sensors use lasers to measure the distance to objects. Smart cars can use this data to build highly accurate maps of their surroundings.

Since robots need to assess their environment to navigate safely, lidar sensors create accurate three-dimensional maps of surroundings to enable them to understand spatial relationships with different objects.