Author | Fish three falcons
Edit | Zheng Xuan
Cats, mechanical arms, two things that look like eight rods can't hit, but because of the user's whimsy, collided with an interesting spark.
Japan's Fuji News Network once reported such a news: in order to make the cat not bored when the cat is alone at home, the owner of the early and late return will install the cat stick at the end of a small mechanical arm, and regularly tease the cat by operating the mechanical arm. In the video, whenever the robotic arm swings the cat stick back and forth, the cat will play with it.
The robotic arm becomes a "cat teasing" artifact
This really subverts people's inherent perceptions of robotic arms.
In the past, the impression of the mechanical arm was that some of the big guys in the factory, even if the body is not large, the material appearance must be made of steel, hard and incomparable.
With the maturity of robotic arm technology and the development of artificial intelligence, "lightweight", "miniaturization" and "collaborative robotic arm" have become new keywords in the robotic arm industry. In addition to teasing cats, collaborative robotic arms can also help people make tea, make coffee, pick fruits... Robotic arms are moving from factories into the lives of geek groups and even ordinary consumers, and their use scenarios are expanding infinitely.
01 Get out of the factory and go collaborative
According to different needs such as structure, application scenario, load accuracy, etc., the robot arm can be subdivided into several tracks, and the "collaborative robot arm" is one of the subdivision tracks with strong development momentum in recent years.
In people's traditional impression, most of the mechanical arm is used in factories, assembly lines, each step of operation has a detailed, standardized process, the task is completed by the engineer in advance to edit the instructions, not only huge, not flexible enough to use, and the cost is extremely high, ordinary people can not reach.
"Is it possible that more people can use robotic arms than just machines in factories doing fixed tasks without the slightest interaction with people?" With the idea of "making the robotic arm more vital", Song Junyi founded elephant robots in 2016, specializing in collaborative robotic arms, and the robotic arm used in the case of the comic cat at the beginning of the article is the cobot myCobot developed by the company.
Song Junyi
In China, most of the startups in the field of collaborative robotic arms started around 2015, such as Yuejiang Technology, Aobo Intelligent and Huiling Technology, which focus on the production of collaborative robotic arms, were founded in 2015, and Elephant Robot was established in 2016.
According to GGII statistics, from 2015 to 2020, the domestic collaborative robot market raised a total of 47 cases, and in the first half of 2021 alone, there were 10 financings in the industry, with a total scale of more than 3 billion yuan.
Compared with the traditional robotic arm, the biggest difference between the cooperative robotic arm is "human-machine collaboration", which changes the rigid and fixed working mode of the traditional robotic arm in the past, not only can work together with people in the same environment, but also realizes human-computer interaction to a certain extent.
The concept of a collaborative robotic arm was first born in Europe.
In 2003, Esben Ostergaard conducted a project study at the University of Southern Denmark on the search for alternatives to hydraulic execution structures, but he and his partners searched all the existing robots on the market and could not find a product that was flexible, easy to use and did not require protection when used.
Unable to find a suitable one, Esben Ostergaard had the idea of starting his own robotics company.
Together with two other partners, he founded Universal Robots in 2005 and in 2008 he finally developed the first collaborative robotic arm, the UR5, which became a pioneer in collaborative robotic arms.
In the same year, Rethink Robotics, another pioneering company for collaborative robotic arms, was founded, and in 2011 Retink launched its own collaborative robotic arm, Baxter.
Since then, the concept of collaborative robotic arm has slowly begun to be accepted by the robot industry, and a large number of newly established collaborative robotic arm companies have emerged abroad, and even the traditional four giants (ABB, Fanuc, KUKA, Yaskawa) have gradually begun to lay out the collaborative robotic arm business.
In contrast, although the domestic robot arm started late, according to GGII data, nearly 70% of the current domestic collaborative robot market is occupied by local manufacturers.
When asked why domestic robot companies are targeting collaborative robotic arms, Song Junyi introduced to Geek Park: "In terms of industry saturation, because the heavy industry-level robotic arm market is almost monopolized by the four giants; from the perspective of market opportunities and customer needs, it is best to choose other market segments if you want to innovate." The collaborative robotic arm is in line with the trend of human-machine interaction, and it is easy to get started, the cost is appropriate, and the market prospect is also broad."
02 Behind the cobot outbreak
There are three major factors behind the outbreak of the domestic lightweight collaborative robotic arm market: the growth of the domestic robot market, the development of the technical environment and the growth of application demand.
In the words of Song Junyi, CEO of Elephant Robotics, this is the result of a collection of "time, place, people".
In 2016, China's robot density was 71, and by 2021, China's robot density has reached 246, which means that there are 246 robots per 10,000 manufacturing population, and in the last 5 years, China has been the main driving market for global robot density growth.
According to the data released by Zhiyan Consulting, the market size of China's robotic arm brands increased from 651 million yuan in 2014 to 2.283 billion yuan in 2018; the market size of foreign brands increased from 7.245 billion yuan in 2014 to 12.636 billion yuan in 2018. In four years, the market size of domestic brands has more than tripled, while the market growth rate of foreign brands has less than doubled.
"Small robotic arms have existed in the industry for a long time, but in recent years, the market for small collaborative robotic arms has exploded mainly due to the development of technology." Zhang Li, general manager of Schaeger Automation, expressed his views to Geek Park.
For collaborative robotic arms, three aspects of technical capabilities are important in order to safely interact with humans.
One is the force perception ability, through the perception of external forces to judge human action, in order to slow down or stop the movement; the second is the visual perception ability, through the visual radar to determine whether the distance between people and machines is safe, whether the robot arm needs to slow down the operation; the third is the computing power, by the algorithm and software according to the force perception and visual perception to make feedback, issued instructions.
"Color recognition" function of the collaborative robotic arm
Force perception ability has developed since the 1990s of the last century, which is a relatively mature technical foundation, and the technological breakthroughs of high-resolution 3D vision, autonomous path planning, and AI recognition in recent years have provided more powerful technical support for the research and development of collaborative robotic arms.
The development of technology has expanded the application scenarios of robotic arms, and the surge in demand has become one of the reasons for the rapid development of lightweight collaborative robotic arms in the past few years.
One of the more representative is the development of the new retail market. According to the China Internet Information Center, since 2013, the mainland has become the world's largest online retail market for seven consecutive years. After the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic in 2020, the market's dependence on online retail has been further strengthened. The form of network new retail has challenged the "rigid automation" of the past production and manufacturing industry.
The assembly line of traditional manufacturing relies on a large number of machines and equipment to complete production, once the market demand, product types change, the replacement cost of hardware is very high, and there is a serious lack of flexibility. Under the circumstance of the development of new retail and the uncertain market demand after the epidemic, whether it is industrial products such as cotton yarn, steel, hardware, or light industrial consumer goods such as clothing, there is a trend of small batches and multiple categories in orders. Through small batches of orders to trial production and trial sales, after testing out the real needs of the market, and then carry out large-scale production.
Under this change in the manufacturing industry, the demand for "flexible production" that can be switched arbitrarily between small batch production and mass production has increased, and the human-robot cooperation ability and relatively flexible use of the collaborative robotic arm make it more able to adapt to new production needs than the traditional robotic arm.
In addition, Song Junyi believes that talent is also an important factor in promoting the rapid development of the domestic robotic arm industry: "Many people who are doing robotic arms now, including myself, have experience in studying and working abroad. Those who choose to return to China to start a business are basically capable and have a vision, and they will certainly be able to develop better products with joint efforts."
03 Future Boundaries
At present, the domestic cooperative robotic arm manufacturers are facing serious product homogenization, increasingly fierce competition pain points, with the development of the market, a new round of adjustment has arrived. The refined development of market segments and application scenarios has been put on the agenda of the robot arm brand.
Zhang Li, general manager of Schig Automation, believes that "even good products are not necessarily suitable for the market, if there are any new requirements for robotic arms in the future, it is required that the technological development of robots must meet the application needs of the scene."
"In the future, the industry will gradually return to its essence and produce leading enterprises in their respective segments, and the markets of each product line will be more refined." Song Junyi also holds a similar view, "In the future, only by deeply integrating robot technology with sub-sectors can we create real value." At present, we have carried out R&D and adaptation in specific industries such as light industry, business, education and so on."
In industrial applications such as palletizing, handling, sorting, welding, spraying, etc., traditional robotic arms often require professional engineers to spend days or even months debugging due to complex coding methods.
"If different brands of robotic arms are purchased separately, the debugging process will be more complicated, not only to debug the equipment of each brand first, but also to debug the overall linkage of the project, which is time-consuming and laborious and may not be able to meet the psychological expectations of users." Zhang Li told Geek Park.
The time and manpower spent on this is too high for most small and medium-sized enterprises.
In response to this pain point, companies like Scher automation have developed a "candy system", through the platform-level system, not only to solve the problem of linking and information transmission between different brands of equipment, but also to develop secondary development for the specific needs of users on this basis, so that the system and single equipment are more in line with the needs of the industry.
Elephant robots are also making efforts. "By building our own application platform myStudio, we integrate the software resources and various development programs of the myCobot series robotic arm, which is convenient for users to update and maintain the system, and has sufficient cases and open source code sharing to try to create a one-stop robotic arm application ecological platform for users."
In the face of the rapid growth of the consumer market in recent years, and the face of ordinary consumers who may not understand the code at all, the ease of use of the collaborative robotic arm is more critical and more difficult to achieve.
"How to solve the problem of ease of use, this is a problem that traditional robotic arms rarely consider," Song Junyi said, "for this we also spent a lot of energy to improve."
Take, for example, elephant robot's six-axis desktop collaborative robotic arm, which has a boxy screen at the bottom, with several simple buttons below the screen to record, save, and play. The only thing the user has to do is to click the record button, and then drag the robot arm according to their own needs, let it do whatever movement you want it to do, and then click save and play, then the trajectory of the robot arm movement will be fully reproduced.
Combined with the global open patent LEGO hole design adopted at the end of the collaborative robotic arm, it can be equipped with a variety of actuators to achieve creative shooting, item picking, palletizing, sorting and identification functions of mobile phones.
The opening "teasing cat artifact" is also so simple to achieve, just tie the cat stick at the end, and the rest can be completed with one click, with almost no technical obstacles.
The LEGO hole design base can also be adapted to a variety of mobile chassis, equipped with composite robots, such as with mobile actuators, trolleys, and even robot dogs, so as to achieve flexible movement of collaborative robotic arms.
In order to allow more ordinary users to get started with the manipulator arm, Elephant Robot has produced a large number of video tutorials. At the same time, it also retains the possibility of secondary development for relatively high-end consumer groups.
By developing a series of kits suitable for different application scenarios and a variety of compatible and expanded interfaces, users will be able to modify the collaborative robotic arm to varying degrees, giving the robotic arm more imagination.
"For example, there were users who fixed a laser projector at the end of the collaborative robotic arm, combined with three-point cloud generation, gesture control and other technologies for secondary development, to achieve gesture control of the movement of the robotic arm, and finally present a three-dimensional tracking image on the wall." The employee of Elephant Robot introduced.
"I'm afraid that the user will have a novel idea, but find that our robotic arm can't help him achieve it." In Song Junyi's view, the collaborative robotic arm should better help everyone realize their whimsical ideas for life.
In the current product form, for consumers who have no independent development ability at all, it is enough to rely on "drag teaching" to achieve creative application scenario drag teaching, and it is not difficult to achieve complex operations such as making coffee and folding clothes plus some code. In a sense, if even ordinary consumers can master the robotic arm and use it to facilitate daily life, this will truly achieve the popularity of the robotic arm.
Helping ordinary consumers more easily achieve their use needs and providing geeks with a basic platform for robotic arm development may be difficult to compatible and difficult to achieve, but it is also an important direction for the future development of collaborative robotic arms. The process of the Internet, smart phones and other products from strange to popular to become a part of people's lives may not be reproduced in the field of collaborative robotic arms.
*Header image source: Visual China
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