Driven by the twin forces of Industry 4.0 and the New Industrialization Strategy, global manufacturing is undergoing a profound transformation—from automation to intelligence, and from standalone production to end-to-end collaborative operations. As the “perception hub” of the equipment-manufacturing sector, high-precision, highly reliable, full-stack, in-house-developed sensor components have become a core enabler of industrial upgrading. Such sensors must not only deliver micron-level measurement accuracy and millisecond response times but also maintain long-term stability under harsh industrial conditions—including extreme temperatures and strong electromagnetic interference—since their technical performance directly determines the sensing capabilities and decision-making levels of intelligent equipment. Over more than a decade of sustained R&D efforts, leading domestic firms have established comprehensive sensor product lines that span multiple physical domains, including mechanics, optics, and electromagnetics. By implementing an agile development framework centered on “customer needs–R&D–validation,” these companies have reduced the cycle for translating customer-specific requirements into product solutions to one-third of the industry average. For example, a six-axis force sensor independently developed by one firm incorporates an innovative strain-gauge beam architecture that, while maintaining 0.01 N measurement accuracy, boosts overload resistance by 500%. This breakthrough has been successfully deployed in collaborative robot joint modules, reducing equipment failure rates by 62%. This development model, rooted in indigenous technology, is reshaping China’s smart-equipment industry ecosystem. Smart sensors based on domestically produced MEMS processes, when integrated with AI-accelerated chips, enable closed-loop control spanning data acquisition to edge computing, raising the defect detection rate on new-energy battery production lines to 99.97%. In the field of unmanned systems, fiber-optic gyroscopes equipped with self-diagnostic capabilities achieve system reliability as high as 99.999% through redundant design, thereby ensuring stable UAV flight even in complex weather conditions. Of particular note is that these breakthrough technologies are now achieving cross-sector penetration via industry consortia, providing technological substitutes for bottleneck areas such as precision semiconductor processing and deep-sea exploration equipment. Today, China’s sensor industry has established a complete innovation chain encompassing basic research, technology transfer, and large-scale application. With the deep integration of 5G and the Industrial Internet, full-stack, in-house-developed smart sensors are building digital-twin ecosystems that cover design, manufacturing, and service. This technology iteration, underpinned by “China-made chips,” is not only propelling high-end equipment toward greater autonomy and controllability but also providing foundational technological support for emerging fields such as AI training-data collection, new-energy-system optimization, and unmanned-system collaboration, thus forming a new type of infrastructure that underpins high-quality manufacturing development. According to statistics, smart equipment incorporating domestically produced high-precision sensors exhibits lifecycle costs more than 40% lower than imported counterparts; this cost advantage is translating into enhanced global-market competitiveness, accelerating the transition from “Made in China” to “Smart Made in China.”