With the acceleration of domestic industrialization, the industrial robot market is booming. According to relevant statistics, the number of domestic industrial robots sold in China increased by about 31 % in a single year between 2013 and 2016. Last year, the number of domestic industrial robots sold exceeded 100,000, and their applications also extended to medical care, automobiles, education, and scientific research.
However, it can be seen that there are still many technical problems in the domestic industrial robots that have yet to be solved, and more and more companies have begun to turn to combine with artificial intelligence(AI) technology. AI industrial robots have gradually become the mainstream of the industry.
At home, AICRObo is undoubtedly one of the leaders in the industry. The Shenzhen company, which was founded in 2015, completed a pilot partnership with JingDong in just over a year on how to commercialise autonomous mobile technology, and is close to mass production in the near future. Recently, Sheyuanbo, founder and CEO of AICRobo(Love Radish), said in an interview with the Securities Times Venture Capital Exchange reporter that many domestic industrial robot companies are still at a level of 50-60 points, and in the current stage of AI robots, There are still many difficulties to achieve complete unmanned, and human-machine cooperation will be the theme in the future.
Sheyuanbo, founder and CEO of AICRObo![]
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Industrial robots are heading for an outbreak.
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In the field of robotics, Sheyuanbo divides the industry into two markets: industrial robots and service robots. In fact, since the beginning of AI in 2015, the integration of AI and the robot field has gradually become a trend in the industry.
Among them, service robots have taken the lead. After combining AI technology, many types of service robots have mushroomed and covered the ground. These include escort type service robots, articular service robots similar to robotic arms, and mobile service robots. Because such robots directly target C-side users, they did receive more capital attention in the early days.
The early love radish has also been laid out for the development of autonomous mobile platforms for service robot manufacturers. However, in the course of practice, Sheyuanbo found that the service robot field has relatively high cost requirements, and autonomous mobile platform technology is still in the early stages of development. There are many products that are mass-produced, parts and mechanical structures that are not fully resolved and therefore can not be reduced to low costs. In addition, the market for service robots has yet to be cultivated, and it is far from the mature time of the market.
So, starting this year, nibbling on radishes has strategically suspended the service robot's line of business, focusing on warehouse automation and industrial automation. Sheyuanbo bluntly said that the industry needs to be stronger, landing earlier, and manufacturers are relatively less sensitive to the price of robots. Therefore, in the early stage of autonomous mobile platform technology, this area is more prone to explosion.
Even in the field of industrial robots, there are many subdivisions. Yuyuanbo, who is well aware of his team's strengths, has focused on the mobile needs of industrial robots. According to the introduction, AGV(automatic guide car) products that currently exist on the market are divided into three generations based on different navigation technologies. The first generation was geomagnetic navigation, magnetic navigation, that is, laying navigation magnetic strips in factories or warehouses, while AGV cars judge the route through magnetic strip sensors. On the basis of the first generation, the second-generation products added new technologies such as laser navigation, Inertial navigation, and two-dimensional code navigation to the first generation of technology.
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But the love of eating radishes obviously goes further. Yuyuanbo told reporters that they used the third generation of technology, the magnetic strip and two-dimensional code to remove restrictions on the mobile path of robot equipment, can fully achieve human-machine coordination. "It is that people walk around in the scene, the robot will actively avoid, and the entire scene, no matter where you tell the robot a target location, he can plan his own path and accurately arrive, similar to the concept of driverless. " said Yuyuanbo.
Talking about the current industry and its own enterprises encountered difficulties in development, "talent" is undoubtedly the most crucial element of the moment. Yuyuanbo said that the process of turning technology into products is very long. It involves constant R&D iterations, improvements, etc.. It faces people's problems, how to find experienced and better technology people, through the team level. Cultivate. With core technology, such talent is scarce. That's why many companies want to do this, but are slow to come up with good products because they have trouble finding the talent to fit their nee
Although the competition is gradually increasing, in the overall domestic industry situation, in the same subdivision, the radish eating is already in the lead. If you use 100 points to calculate, in the opinion of Yuyuanbo, the best thing in the world is currently about 80 points. Although there is not much difference between the technical level and the international level of development, there are still some gaps in product perfection. In this case, Yuyuanbo scored 70 points for his product. He bluntly said that there are still many companies in the field can only achieve 50-60 points, many even far from the real commercial application.
"This is mainly limited by talent. Many companies have finally found a group of more experienced people. When they developed their products to about 60 points, people left. Therefore, for an enterprise, the continuity of technology is very important. But Mr Yuyuanbo points out that there is a certain advantage in the technology continuity segment over the industry. According to the report, at present, a total of 31 employees, 24 of them are R&D personnel. Among them, the most core research and development talents of the brain part of the system robot are all self-cultivated by the team and are all master students. The system includes the capabilities of motion perception, AI decision-making, motion control, leading guidance(taking people to go), autonomous transportation(independent walking), intelligent following(following people), etc.. It has multi-sensor fusion perception, positioning, and obstacle avoidance. Technology, etc.. And open a secondary development interface that supports various systems.
Returning to Yuyuanbo himself, during his studies, he did exactly the research direction of "Visual Robotic Navigation" at the LAMDA Institute of Nanjing University. In 2013, he established the AICRobo Smart Robot Technology Team to focus on doing autonomous mobile engineering. System development. "I am focused on this technology myself, and the technology partners have a rich accumulation, and the entire technology team is currently very stable. " said Yuyuanbo.
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More scenarios are expected to be promoted
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According to him, the AICANS system it used, which had been developed since January 2014, was an autonomous mobile system dedicated to commercial applications and had been iterated to the second generation. Yuyuanbo said the autonomous mobile robot products they produce are mainly used in two fields, one is intelligent warehouse selection and the other is intelligent factory handling.
At present, the team has cooperated with Jingdong in the storage and transportation business, has deployed multiple machines in the warehouse in Jingdong, and has a dispatch center, and has docked with his enterprise management system WMS system. Currently, it is advancing the application plan. It is expected to be widely promoted within it.
The reason why Jingdong was "seen", Yuyuanbo said, is because Jingdong had no suitable automation program to intervene in the specific scene of the high shelf warehouse. "Because a lot of smart solutions are going to have to transform the entire warehouse on a large scale, replacing the old shelves. They simply calculate this economic benefit. The cost of this replacement input has a very long recovery period, and this plan can not be truly promoted. In contrast, Yuyuanbo said, the radish use method is a human-machine coordination method that does not require the transformation of its entire warehouse. Instead, the machine and dispatch center intervene in its environment to help people improve people's efficiency and save human resources. So the cost of the whole investment is very low.
With Jingdong's "trial water", it is also the team led by Yuyuanbo in business