BEIJING: A Pakistani maker of AI-based garment inspection systems says it can now build most of its inspection system at home. The precision parts inside an industrial robot are another matter, and its founder says Chinese partners could help close that gap.
Awais Yasin, founder and CEO of Robionix Technologies, called for joint laboratories tied to industrial projects, joint ventures with defined localisation targets and long-term training between Chinese and Pakistani engineers in a written interview with China Economic Net (CEN).
The company’s system, MagicQC, checks whether a finished garment matches the buyer’s order. The garment goes on a measurement bed, a camera identifies the measurement points, and the system returns a pass or fail.
Getting that right matters in Pakistan’s largest export industry, where measurements must meet buyer specifications and tolerances. Textiles earned $17.88 billion in the 2024-25 fiscal year, about 56 percent of the country’s merchandise exports, according to the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. In a recent installation, Yasin said, only three major components came from abroad: the industrial camera, the operator touchscreen and its mounting assembly. The measurement bed, lighting, display, computer and electrical parts were made or sourced in Pakistan, as was the integration work.
Robionix has deployed systems at factories in Karachi, Faisalabad and Sialkot, though commercial installations remain limited, he said.
A robot is harder. An inspection system stays still and looks. A robot arm has to move to a point and return to it with the accuracy, repeatability, speed and reliability expected of industrial equipment, which depends on servo motors, precision encoders, harmonic or planetary gear reducers and servo drives. Yasin said Pakistan lacks local sources for those components at the precision and scale required. It can design the structure, the electronics, the control software and the vision system, Yasin said. What it lacks is the precision manufacturing base those parts demand, which leaves the fully indigenous six-axis industrial arm he has wanted to build for years out of reach.
“The robot itself is not the biggest problem,” he said. “The missing ecosystem around the robot is the bigger challenge.”
He saw that ecosystem while studying for a robotics PhD at the Beijing Institute of Technology in the 2010s: universities doing advanced research, companies building robots, suppliers producing precision components, factories deploying them at scale. China installed 295,000 industrial robots in 2024, 54 percent of the world’s total, according to the International Federation of Robotics.
Pakistan, meanwhile, was buying finished automation equipment, said Yasin, who is also a professor at the National University of Technology in Islamabad. The gap has narrowed in awareness, research and startups but remains wide in industrial scale and component manufacturing.
China’s production base in motors, reducers and controllers makes Chinese suppliers potential partners, Yasin said. Such cooperation should start with localising integration and manufacturing, he said, then move towards making the critical parts in Pakistan, with Pakistani engineers building alongside their Chinese counterparts. –Agencies
