Service robots have moved from concept pilots to full popularization, and are about to usher in explosive market scale growth.
An industrial boom in service robots is surging towards us.
In the past 2021, global service robot sales reached 14.6 billion US dollars, with an annual growth rate of 32.2% creating a peak growth rate since 2016, of which the size of China's service robot market was 39.18 billion yuan, accounting for more than 1/4 of the world.
In just one year, the number of service robot companies in China soared by 78.92% to 105,000; there were also 113 financings for service robot tracks, with a total financing amount of more than 44 billion yuan.
More importantly, the moment is just the beginning.
Third-party reports predict that the annual sales of service robots in China are expected to reach 61.35 billion yuan in 2023, doubling from 2021.
The "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of the Robot Industry" jointly issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other 15 ministries and commissions in December 2021 also predicts that the operating income of China's robot industry will grow at an average annual rate of more than 20% in the next five years.
In this plan, a number of top-level plans to promote the development of the service robot industry are also about to be gradually landed.
There is no doubt that the development of the entire industry has approached the "critical point":
Technological breakthroughs such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and flexible joints on the supply side, the epidemic on the demand side, and the upgrading of digital industries are making service robots move from "function" to "intelligence", from concept pilot to full popularization, and will soon usher in explosive market scale growth.
For many years, we have been convinced that robots will be like smart phones, fully popularized throughout human society.
Back in February 2007, Bill Gates predicted in Global Science that in the near future, every home would have a robot.
But the reality is that to this day, this dream is still far from being realized.
Although the research and development, manufacturing and application of robots have always been highly valued by the government and capital, China has been the world's largest robot market for 8 consecutive years since 2013.
However, unlike industrial robots that mainly work in "unmanned environments" and pay more attention to efficiency and precision, the application scenarios of service robots need to be in close contact with people, so they pay more attention to the "flexibility" and safety of the service process.
Therefore, service robots need to be lighter, smarter, and more powerful in environmental awareness and human-computer interaction capabilities.
Service robots must rely on comprehensive breakthroughs in science and technology in many different fields such as new materials, artificial intelligence, flexible joints, sensors, etc., in order to truly achieve product maturity.
At the same time, more complex technical requirements mean higher costs. This also further restricts the commercial popularity of service robots.
However, the situation has gradually changed.
On the demand side, since 2019, the ravages of the new crown epidemic have made "contactless services" just needed, from hospitals to hotels, from distribution to inspection, in the process of epidemic prevention and control and resumption of work and production, a large number of service robots have already taken to work.
Even in recent years, more and more industry representatives have suggested that under the condition of meeting the requirements of economy, technology and reliability, robots should be used to replace manual repetitive labor to alleviate the increasing "labor shortage".
More importantly, on the supply side, the two major bottlenecks of service robots to maturity also have solutions.
The first bottleneck is the intelligence level.
In the past, due to the limitations of artificial intelligence capabilities, service robots could only be like functional mobile phones, engaged in limited fixed work, food delivery could not be cleaned, and inspections could not cut grapes.
Now, with the continuous breakthrough of new materials, high-precision control and software algorithms, artificial intelligence has made rapid progress in deep learning, knowledge graph, scene recognition, human-computer interaction, reasoning and cognition, and the service robot is about to achieve a subversive upgrade:
Just as smart phones replace feature phones, the currently widely used service robots with single functions will gradually be replaced by service robots with universal intelligence that can provide a multi-functional, multi-modal service experience.
The upgrading of China's communication infrastructure has made it possible to land "cloud intelligent robots".
The robot's movements need to rely on joints. In the past, as the joints increased, the amount of computation would continue to enlarge, thereby consuming a large amount of computing power and energy of the robot, resulting in an increase in the volume, energy consumption and cost of the robot, which greatly affected the application and popularity of service robots.
"Cloud intelligent robot" is the architecture proposed by the Chinese robot unicorn enterprise Damin, which separates the "brain" of the robot responsible for computing work from the ontology, and places the "brain" in the cloud, and the robot ontology is mainly responsible for perception and service.
In this way, the "upper limit" of traditional service robots is completely broken: only one communication network connection is needed to connect the joints, and the entire system becomes a system that can be infinitely expanded, and any complex robot can be made.
The prerequisite for this idea is that we must establish a complete and high-speed "cloud-network-end" system, through a powerful cloud brain, a fast and reliable neural network, connecting massive robot ontology, and the entire system is collaborative to complete the service for us.
A major advance in 5G networks is to shorten the transmission delay of network signals to less than 10 milliseconds - corresponding to the signal transmission speed of human nerves, from the brain to the joints and muscles, the delay generally takes 180 to 240 milliseconds.
At the same time, the "East Counting West Calculation" project officially launched by the state this year also puts forward very high technical requirements for the data transmission of the backbone network, even if the data is transmitted from the Alibaba Cloud data center of the Zhangbei cluster to the Tencent data center in Gui'an, the delay is not more than 20 milliseconds in principle.
This means that through the "brain" a thousand kilometers away, to support intelligent robots to serve us, its response speed can still be faster than the neural response of our human body.
The second bottleneck is the flexible service capability of the robot.
In the past, the vast majority of service robots had feet and no hands, had scroll wheels to move, and even interacted, but the vast majority did not have flexible arms and could not serve us like real people.
However, facing the future, whether it is delivery, taking care of the elderly, sorting out housework, or handling farm work, the more intelligent intelligent robots, the more they need to have a strong "hands-on ability".
This bottleneck is the last barrier to overcome high-end robots: in order for service robots to obtain flexible arms and achieve complex combined actions, it is necessary to have intelligent, miniaturized, high-strength flexible joints.
This core component, accounting for 70% of the cost of intelligent robots, is also the short board of the mainland robot industry, which has long been monopolized by the "four major families" of foreign robots.
Now, domestic robot companies have also made up for this key short board through independent research and development.
In 2021, in the Maqiao Artificial Intelligence Innovation Pilot Zone in Minhang, Shanghai, an intelligent robot base covering an area of 243 acres has been erected.
One of the core products of this base-scale mass production is the SCA (Intelligent Flexible Joint) independently developed and produced by Damin. Under the same performance, its volume is only 1/10 of the traditional server system, and the minimum diameter can be 35 mm thick, which can make the robot smaller and more flexible.
Relying on SCA, Da min was approved as a strategic emerging industry project in Shanghai in 2021, which is the most supported project since the establishment of the project. At present, more than 100 ecological customers are using Damin SCA, including medical robots, rehabilitation robots, special robots, etc.
Previously, In 2019, Damin has successfully developed and manufactured a humanoid service robot Ginger with 34 degrees of freedom, which has a pair of flexible hands that can perform various movements.
"The bones of the human body have about 350 degrees of freedom, and in the future, as long as there is a network with high enough bandwidth, fast enough latency, and an IP address for each joint, we can completely create a cloud intelligent robot with the same degrees of freedom, bipedal humanoid, and Damin is to build a family nanny robot for each family." Huang Xiaoqing, founder of Damin, said.
It is worth noting that in the wave of development of service robots, Chinese companies are expected to occupy a more important industrial position.
Prior to this, due to the late start, lack of technology accumulation, and weak industrial foundation, a large number of core technologies and core components of China's industrial robot industry had to rely on foreign enterprises, and high-end supply was lacking, until now, it is still necessary to catch up.
But in the field of service robots, China has come to the same starting line with foreign companies, and even established a leading edge in some fields such as cloud, network, and intelligence.
One of the most representative examples is that as early as 2015, Da Min took the lead in proposing the concept of "cloud robot" and comprehensively launched the layout. At present, Damin has begun to commercialize and occupy a first-mover advantage in many vertical industries such as commercial retail, public health, communications, education, public safety, power and energy, agriculture, and sanitation, with huge room for growth.
Now, Damin has successfully built the robot's cloud brain operating system "Hai Rui", and the robot virtual development platform "Hai Yuan World" - the robot meta universe.
The essence of the Hairui system is the "cloud-network-end" architecture built by Damin for cloud service robots, which has established a brain with universal intelligence capabilities, a safe and efficient neural network, and a cloud intelligent robot system that has been successfully verified.
Haiyuan World is a working and learning environment in which robots understand the physical world, intelligent training and virtual and real interaction. Under the support of cloud computing power, millions of digital twin robots continue to carry out deep reinforcement learning in large-scale simulation scenarios in haiyuan world, and gradually form the intelligence of cloud robots. Then, through the combination of virtual and real technology, the robot works in the real world.
At the same time, Damin's Hairui operating system also provides developers with an integrated application development kit RDK for robot application development, known as HARIX RDK. It provides a complete visual development tool, developers can achieve low-code application development by direct dragging and dropping, so that developers can completely separate from physical robots, quickly and at low cost to develop a variety of robot applications, greatly reducing the threshold of robot application development.
"Even people who can't write programs can do application development for robots." Huang Xiaoqing said.
The purpose of Damin's launch of the Hairui system is to open up the architecture of cloud intelligent robots to the entire industry.
In the past, if an entrepreneurial team wanted to develop intelligent robots, it needed to first consider what kind of chips, sensors, joints, servers, radars, image modules were used, how they were assembled, what kind of product form they became, and then develop drivers and learning algorithms from scratch, and then verify and adjust optimization step by step... Not only is it time-consuming and laborious, but it is also costly and risky.
Now, relying on the Hi-Rui operating system, the third-party robot company only needs to access Damin's cloud brain to quickly complete the simulation modeling, application development and virtual verification of the robot on the virtual platform, and then produce the real robot according to the simulation indicators after completion.
"Our positioning is to be the architect of the ecology." Huang Xiaoqing said that the entire intelligent robot industry is an extremely long and complex industrial chain, of which, most of the areas that others can do, Da min will not get involved, "such as intelligent flexible joints, we also looked for a circle at that time, no one in China can really make it, and then we have to do it ourselves to make up for the ecology." ”
At present, Damin has cooperated with many industry partners and universities to serve more than 2,400 customers in the industry chain. "Damin will continue to promote the construction of the cloud robot industry ecosystem and the large-scale development of the industry." Huang Xiaoqing said.
At present, a common perception in the industry is that the next ten years will become the "golden decade" of service robots.
If the epidemic has opened a window for the application of service robots, then the severe challenge of population aging and the serious shortage of labor, as a major challenge in the future Chinese society, will surely promote more industrial robots and service robots, becoming more and more intelligent, more and more popular, and assisting us to complete more work.
In this process, with the introduction of new technologies such as information and communication, biotechnology, new energy, new materials, and artificial intelligence, the robot industry will also stand on the take-off outlet, usher in a qualitative change from function to intelligence, continuously upgrade and leapfrog development, and finally achieve large-scale application popularization in the whole society.
Perhaps, in the near future, we will be like Bill Gates's prediction, ushering in the era of "robots in every house".
At that time, the intelligent robot in the cloud will become the third computer for human beings after PCs and mobile phones. Huang Xiaoqing said.
While industrial robots continue to attack and constantly refresh historical achievements, service robots are also on the rise. Statistics from the International Federation of Robotics show that since the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, service robots have achieved counter-trend growth, and it is expected to increase by 20.7% year-on-year in 2020.