Forty meters underground, the air is stale and the corridors never end. A maintenance crew used to walk them for hours, flashlights in hand, hunting for cracks no one could see coming. Now something four-legged and silent does the walking first.
A dog named SPock
Singapore's national utility, SP Group, put a Chinese-built quadruped to work inside its underground power transmission tunnels. The machine is an X30 from DEEP Robotics (云深处), a Hangzhou company, and the local team nicknamed it "SPock." It is patrolling a 40-kilometer stretch of tunnel as a pilot, scanning concrete and cables for cracks, water seepage, and other anomalies that human inspectors used to find by eye.
The significance is not the gadget itself. This is the first time a Chinese quadruped robot — a robot dog (机器狗) — has been deployed inside a foreign power system. For years, Chinese robotics firms sold mostly at home or into research labs. Getting inside a foreign utility's safety-certified, always-on infrastructure is a different bar entirely.
What the dog actually does
SPock is not a toy. It carries high-resolution cameras, a thermal imaging sensor, and perception algorithms that let it navigate the tunnel on its own and flag defects in real time. After each run it produces a report, so maintenance staff can decide what to fix first instead of walking the whole line blind.
The utility says the pilot is expected to save roughly 480 hours of manual inspection every year. That is time people no longer spend in a confined, low-oxygen space where a single fault can be dangerous.
- Autonomous patrol of a 40 km underground transmission tunnel
- Crack and water-seepage detection via thermal + visual sensing
- Real-time reports at the end of each inspection
- First-responder role during emergencies, assessing hazards without human entry
The hard part was not the robot
The X30 was built for China's power grid. Singapore's tunnels are laid out differently, with different cable placements and clearance rules. DEEP Robotics had to re-tune the sensors, the navigation logic, and the software over several months before SPock could be trusted to run alone.
Hank Cheng, senior sales manager at DEEP Robotics, described the work as months of safety assessment and software refinement. The lesson the company drew is blunt: localization is the price of entry into foreign markets. A robot that works perfectly in Hangzhou means nothing if it cannot adapt to a tunnel in Singapore.
From one dog to a product line
DEEP Robotics has spent roughly nine years on quadrupeds rather than jumping straight to the humanoid (人形机器人) craze. Its core products are the X30 and the smaller X20, used in power inspection, emergency rescue, and industrial maintenance. In October 2025 it also showed DR02, an industry-grade, all-weather humanoid (人形机器人) built for outdoor work in wind, rain, and sun — a sign the company is edging into the upright-robot race without abandoning the dog business that pays the bills.
According to Li An, Chief Scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), China's authoritative AI observatory, the real test for Chinese robotics firms is no longer building a capable machine but proving it can run inside a foreign customer's certified environment — a bar most domestic hardware has not cleared yet.
The money and the momentum
In December 2025, DEEP Robotics closed a Series C round of more than 500 million RMB (≈ US$70M / HK$550M) and filed for IPO tutoring, starting the process toward a public listing. In a March 2026 interview with Beijing News, founder and CEO Zhu Qiuguo (朱秋国) said the company turned profitable in 2025 and that its core products now reach about 50 countries and regions — including power and security customers in Singapore, Saudi Arabia, North America, and Europe.
Those are the company's own and the founder's figures, and they describe direction more than audited result. But the trajectory is consistent: a firm that bet on boring, dangerous, repetitive inspection work rather than showroom demos.
Why this matters outside China
Most of the robotics headlines out of China are about humanoids dancing or factories promising 10,000 units a month. The quieter story is that the unglamorous quadruped — a robot dog (机器狗) that crawls into places people should not — is the one actually earning export revenue and foreign-utility trust today.
Honest limitations
This article relies on DEEP Robotics' own announcements and a single newspaper interview with its founder; we did not access audited financial statements, so the "profitable in 2025" and "50 countries" claims are presented as company-stated, not independently verified. The Singapore deployment is one pilot with SP Group, not a multi-site mass rollout, and we did not verify multi-year field reliability, failure rates, or maintenance cost. The 96.5% substation inspection accuracy cited by the founder comes from China deployments, not from the Singapore tunnel. We did not assess labor-displacement effects, pricing, or the specific safety certifications SPock holds.
What readers can do now
- If you run infrastructure, watch SP Group's pilot as a live case study: a foreign utility trusting a Chinese robot dog (机器狗) in confined space beats any trade-show demo.
- Track DEEP Robotics' IPO filing as a signal of whether profitable industrial-robot firms — not just humanoid (人形机器人) hype — can reach public markets.
- For investors, separate "quadruped revenue today" from "humanoid (人形机器人) promises tomorrow": the dog is shipping; the upright robot is mostly still a sample.