Lei Jun's "super surprise"

Figure: Figure worm

Source: 21tech

Author: Poplar

Editor: Li Qingyu

On the first working day of 2022, Xiaomi held an award ceremony in the park, and the highest award was worth $1 million.

This is Xiaomi's internal "million dollar technology award", and it is also the heaviest technical award of Xiaomi company, mainly rewarding the engineer team of less than 10 people. Since 2019, the award has been awarded for three consecutive years.

In the first two years, three Xiaomi technical teams, including the MIX Alpha surround screen technical team, the second charge technical team and the MIUI privacy protection capacity building team, became the highest award winners. In 2021, the competition for the Technology Awards is more intense than in previous years.

From the launch of the project in May 2021 to the end of December, 68 projects from 8 business departments such as Xiaomi Mobile Phone Department, China Region, Group Technology Committee, Group Information Technology Department, Ecological Chain, Major Appliances, Internet Business Department, and Tianxing Digital Department participated in the selection, and finally, the Xiaomi CyberDog "Iron Egg" Bionic Robot Team won the highest award in 2021.

At the award ceremony, Lei Jun, founder, chairman and CEO of Xiaomi Group, said, "'Technology-oriented' is the iron law that Xiaomi never changes, and ensuring the sense of achievement and happiness of engineers is the top priority of the group." Next, Xiaomi will continue to increase R & D investment, and Xiaomi's R & D investment will exceed 100 billion yuan in 5 years."

The "Iron Egg" project was an unexpected surprise

For the award-winning projects, Lei Jun said that participating in the selection of the Xiaomi Million Dollar Technology Award every year makes him particularly excited, and this year's top award winner gave him three "super surprises".

Lei Jun said that first of all, there are two fresh master's graduates recruited by the school in 2020 in the "Iron Egg" team, who joined Xiaomi for only one year and won Xiaomi's highest technology award;

Secondly, the "Iron Egg" project brings together the technology of many of Xiaomi's R& D teams, which have quickly been applied to Xiaomi's core products. For example, the photography function of Xiaomi Mi 12's "all things chasing focus" comes from the "master tracking technology" of iron eggs;

Finally, the "Iron Egg" project represents the pioneering spirit, self-driving force and imagination of Xiaomi engineers for future technological life. "This project is a self-organized and independent project by Xiaomi engineers, and with such a small team, such achievements in such a short period of time are really far beyond our imagination," Lei Jun said.

Xu Xiaowang (pseudonym), a graduate of Harbin University of Science and Technology, is one of the two fresh master's graduates mentioned by Lei Jun, who joined Xiaomi in June 2020 and first worked in the mobile phone department for 3 months before joining the "Iron Egg" team.

In fact, the "Iron Egg" team is a patchwork of xiaomi colleagues in different businesses, so before the team was established, their knowledge of robots was almost zero, let alone bionic quadruped robots.

The only thing the team knew about robots was Xu Xiaowang, because he had been a robot for many years during his college years, but he had never tried a leg-foot robot. Therefore, in the "Iron Egg" team, xu Xiaowang, a fresh graduate, has become a team mentor, including product definition and the robot's core motion control algorithm, which is dominated by it.

In this way, the "Iron Egg" team from 0 to 1, lasted 10 months, through bold innovation in joint motors, motion control, intelligent interaction and other technologies, and finally achieved the first time to reduce the price of four-legged bionic robots to less than 10,000 and mass production results.

For Xiaomi, the "Iron Egg" bionic robot is a new exploration of its technology field, this time winning the million-dollar technology award and the first award by a non-mobile phone project in nearly three years.

It is reported that Xiaomi has created an open source community of "iron eggs" on GitHub, and developers have let "iron eggs" carry lidar to mine inspections through secondary development. When the "iron egg" is given more missions, Xiaomi's hard technology strength is also highlighted.

How will 100 billion be spent?

Two years ago, Xiaomi announced a five-year research and development plan to invest 50 billion yuan. In the past two years, Xiaomi's R& D investment has exceeded 22 billion yuan, of which in 2021 alone, Xiaomi invested about 13 billion yuan in research and development.

Where have the tens of billions of R&D investments already spent been spent? Where will the next 100 billion be invested? Recently, Zeng Xuezhong, president of Xiaomi's mobile phone department, said in an interview with 21st Century Business Herald that by the end of 2021, Xiaomi has established a technical map involving 12 major fields and 98 subdivisions, covering various technologies developed and applied by Xiaomi such as smart phones, smart cars, robots, software and algorithms, e-commerce, intelligent manufacturing, and finance.

This is the technical system that Xiaomi has established through continuous investment in the past few years, "Next, Xiaomi will continue to invest along this series of directions", Zeng Xuezhong said, "These general directions are determined, and we will also carry out some optimization according to the changes in the industry and technology trends."

Specifically, Xiaomi's R& D investment will be mainly reflected in three aspects:

The first is to improve the R&D environment. Zeng Xuezhong said that at present, Xiaomi has established more than 200 laboratories around the world, involving dozens of different professional and technical fields, and increasing the procurement of research and development equipment and investment in technology will greatly improve the efficiency of research and development.

The second is the construction of talent teams. Xiaomi has 5 Chinese R&D centers and 6 overseas R&D centers, which means that it needs to recruit high-end talents around the world. At present, Xiaomi has 16,000 engineers, of which 5,000 will join Xiaomi in 2021.

Finally, there is the investment in technological innovation. Zeng Xuezhong said that the reason why Xiaomi insists on awarding the million-dollar technology award every year is to create an environment for young engineers with innovation and ideas to dare to innovate. Let them really feel the courage of Xiaomi in respecting the crazy ideas of engineers and encouraging the exploration of no man's land in technology.

Behind the "Iron Egg" project, it is actually the engineer culture that Xiaomi has always emphasized. In addition, the "iron egg" project has allowed Xiaomi to see the potential of young talents, Lei Jun bluntly said that "heroes out of teenagers", so he proposed that in the future, the training and appointment of "young heroes" should be included in the evaluation indicators for the capacity building of various departments.

Not only that, Lei Jun also announced that xiaomi will continue to recruit 5,000 outstanding young engineers in 2022 and continue to strengthen the construction of the engineer team.

Lei Jun said that at present, Xiaomi is at a critical moment in the beginning of the new decade's journey, and is also facing a series of major propositions that determine the future and fate of Xiaomi, such as winning the world's first mobile phone in three years, officially benchmarking Apple in product experience, and preparing for smart car-related undertakings. And these will also be a broad space for Xiaomi engineers to show their skills.

Editor: Lu Taoran