At the 2023 World Robot Conference held in Beijing, more than 160 domestic and foreign robot companies participated in the exhibition with nearly 600 exhibits, of which 60 new products were launched for the first time in the world.
The future is here! What are the new highlights of "Robot+"? How to more deeply affect human production and life? What are the future trends? The "Xinhua Viewpoint" reporter launched a visit.
Richer application scenarios
Strong and flexible wrist, high torque design, 4 red robotic arms waving up and down, spot welding for the car body... At the 2023 World Robot Conference, Shenyang Siasun Company's body-in-white spot welding robot workstation developed for the automotive industry attracted attention.
This is the body-in-white welding joint robot workstation photographed at the 2023 World Robotics Congress on August 17. Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Zhang Chenlin
"We started to develop this robot in 2012, and after continuous quality upgrades, the repeatable positioning accuracy of the equipment now reaches plus or minus 0.2 mm. At present, the company has cooperated with many domestic automobile manufacturers, and has deployed about 100 units. Ma Cheng, industry manager of Siasun Company, said.
In addition, Siasun also brought a new model "Xingweilai" robot for industrial cleaning and modernization, and a wheeled underground inspection robot for coal mines for unmanned inspection in special fields.
In the agricultural exhibition area, the gigantic orchard dobby picking robot stands out. The robotic arm accurately grasps an apple through position and light sensitivity, allowing the audience to have a more intuitive understanding of agricultural modernization and intelligence. This robot is developed by the Intelligent Equipment Technology Research Center of Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, through the robotic arm and fruit acquisition device, to realize the whole process of automatic harvesting of fruit picking, fruit and fruit storage, and has the ability to work continuously day and night, and can pick 400 to 550 fruits per hour, greatly improving the picking efficiency.
This is a smart picking robot photographed at the World Robot Congress 2023 (taken on August 17). Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Ren Chao
Li Tao, the project leader of the picking robot, said that while improving the efficiency of the operation, the equipment can avoid damage to the fruit to the greatest extent. At present, the robot has been trialed in farmland orchards in Beijing, Shandong and other places, and mass production models will be launched soon. "In the future, more lightweight models will be launched to meet the requirements of various geographical conditions."
The rapid recovery of China's economy has increased social and industrial demand, coupled with the interactive integration and development of new materials, new energy, life sciences and other technologies and robots, the robot industry is widely penetrating into industrial manufacturing, agricultural production, trade logistics, medical and health, commercial community services and other fields.
According to statistics, in 2022, the operating income of China's robot industry will exceed 170 billion yuan, continuing to maintain double-digit growth; Industrial robot sales account for more than half of the world's total, ranking first in the world for 10 consecutive years. In the first half of 2023, the output of industrial robots reached 222,000 sets, a year-on-year increase of 5.4%; The output of service robots was 3.53 million sets, a year-on-year increase of 9.6%. The continuous acceleration of industrial synergy and integration has greatly changed social production and lifestyle, injecting strong impetus into development.
Fuller policy support
At the beginning of this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other seventeen departments issued the "Robot +" Application Action Implementation Plan, pressing the "accelerator key" for the development of China's robot industry, expanding the depth and breadth of robot applications, and cultivating robot development and application ecology.
Xin Guobin, vice minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that China has maintained strong development vitality, the strength of robot brands has been continuously enhanced, there are 273 specialized and special new "little giant" enterprises in the field of robotics, and 10 robot companies have grown into single champions in the manufacturing industry. Driven by technology and market, the robot industry chain continues to expand and extend, and manufacturing enterprises, technology giants, and cutting-edge enterprises are giving full play to different advantages to carry out differentiated layouts, forming a pattern of cross-integration, interdependence and common development.
At present, the application field of industrial robots has covered 65 industry categories and 206 industries, and is more widely used in traditional industries such as bathroom, ceramics, hardware, and furniture, and is rapidly expanding in emerging industries such as new energy vehicles, lithium batteries, and photovoltaics. In the field of people's livelihood services, robots such as education, navigation, distribution, and cleaning are widely used in schools, hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, office buildings and many other scenarios. At the same time, robots are also playing an increasingly important role in major projects such as manned spaceflight, lunar exploration and fire detection, China's sky eye, and the Qinghai-Tibet railway.
Government departments in many places actively cooperate with downstream industries to jointly promote robot application promotion, establish a "robot +" application collaborative promotion array, and support the construction of robot experience centers and test verification centers. Beijing, Hebei, Shanghai, Guangdong and other places have successively issued policy documents to select and promote "robot +" application scenarios and benchmark enterprises. Through departmental coordination and central and local linkage, the depth and breadth of robot applications have been greatly expanded.
The "Beijing Robot Industry Innovation and Development Action Plan (2023-2025)" recently released by Beijing proposes to develop a robot "1+4" product system - "1" refers to stepping up the layout of humanoid robots, and "4" refers to driving the development of four types of advantageous robot products in medical health, collaboration, special and logistics, and implementing hundreds of new robot projects. At the same time, it will focus on breakthroughs in key technologies such as humanoid robot general prototypes and general artificial intelligence large models.
The development momentum is stronger
In the future, a large number of "robot +" scenarios have been displayed at the robot conference.
The arm is fixed on the bracket, the hand holds the round handle, the operator can set the upper limb activity games such as cutting watermelon, plane battle, butterfly fluttering on the screen to help patients carry out rehabilitation training, which is the upper limb rehabilitation training system developed by Eston Medical.
This is an upper limb rehabilitation training system developed by Eston Medical (photographed on August 16). Photo by Xinhua News Agency reporter Ji Ning
Xu Yuanyuan, head of Eston medical-related projects, said that the maximum resistance set by the system is about 3 kg, which can meet the basic needs of upper limb rehabilitation training in rehabilitation groups, help patients exercise upper limb strength, and promote nerve pathway recovery. "This set of equipment has been put into use in some rehabilitation hospitals and nursing homes in Beijing, Nanjing and other places."
In the "Robot + Medical" health section of the Robot Conference, the application of robots in the overall disease course service system such as surgery, auxiliary examination, auxiliary patrol, rehabilitation, examination and sampling, in-hospital treatment, telemedicine and post-hospital rehabilitation tracking was displayed. The "Robot + Agriculture" section focuses on the functions of robots in automatic seeding, weeding, watering, harvesting, fertilization, irrigation, land survey, picking, sorting and so on. There are also application scenarios such as elderly care, commercial services, emergency and extreme environments, and various devices lead to infinite reverie.
The "China Robot Technology and Industry Development Report (2023)" released at this robot conference proposed that the mainland has a broad robot application market, with the steady implementation of the "robot +" action, the application field of robots is accelerating expansion, and the application in new energy vehicles, medical surgery, power inspection, photovoltaic and other fields continues to deepen and solidify, strongly supporting the digital transformation and intelligent upgrading of the industry.
For the future development of the mainland robot industry, Xin Guobin said that China has accelerated the promotion of "robot +" application actions, encouraged emerging fields to explore first, accelerated the intelligent transformation of agriculture, industry and service industries through the integrated application of robots, cultivated a robot integration innovation ecosystem, expanded the scale of the robot industry at a higher level, and enriched the form of industrial development. (Reporter Li Dexin, Ji Ning, Li Chunyu, Yang Na, participated in the writing of Li Yuyang)
Source: Xinhua News Agency