From April 10th to 12th, Hikrobot Intelligent Manufacturing Conference 2024 was held in Hangzhou. Since its official establishment in 2016, Hikrobot has come to the 8th year of development, and at the intelligent manufacturing conference, Hikrobot also announced the "report card" of the 8 years of development: serving 17,000+ customers and 200+ subdivided industries. Among them, since the establishment of the company in 16 years, the compound annual growth rate of machine vision business has reached 50%, the transaction customers have reached 15,000+, and the ecological partners have reached 200+, and the compound annual growth rate of mobile robot business has reached 60+% from 2017 to 2023, serving 2,000+ customers, and the market ownership has exceeded 80,000 units.
From this remarkable "report card", we can not only clearly see the leapfrog development made by Hikrobot in the past eight years, but also gain insight into its deep accumulation and strong strength in the field of intelligent manufacturing.
Go with the flow
Pioneer of flexible intelligent manufacturing, exploring new production models
In 2016, a new round of global scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation stepped up to emerge, forming a historical intersection with the transformation and upgrading of the mainland's manufacturing industry. The rapid development of intelligent manufacturing on a global scale has had a profound impact on industrial development and division of labor, and promoted the formation of new production methods, industrial forms and business models.
In the past 8 years, the government, industry organizations, and enterprises have worked together to actively cultivate the future competitive advantages of the manufacturing industry, and Hikrobot has also integrated itself into the exploration of intelligent manufacturing to promote the accelerated transformation of the intelligent manufacturing and logistics industry.
Especially in recent years, with the continuous change of the global environment and the increasing diversity of market demand, traditional factories are facing new opportunities and challenges, and it has become the norm to respond to uncertainty at any time. Enterprises have realized that the direction of intelligent upgrading and breakthrough cannot be just a single-point breakthrough, but only the reconstruction of the whole industrial chain.
Jia Yonghua, CEO of Hikrobot
Jia Yonghua, CEO of Hikrobot, delivered a keynote speech entitled "Flexible Intelligent Manufacturing in Practice" at the Intelligent Manufacturing Conference 2024 – Main Summit, discussing the "inevitable" and "necessary" of flexible intelligent manufacturing: "We are in an unprecedented new era, with the continuous changes in the global business environment and the increasing diversity of market demand, it has become the norm to respond to uncertainty at any time. ”
As a physical carrier and practice platform for flexible and intelligent manufacturing, smart factories are redefining the way of production and manufacturing and the direction of future development in this digital and intelligent era.
Jia Yonghua mentioned: "The smart factory is the practice carrier of intelligence, which is closely coordinated and integrated by the five levels of infrastructure, intelligent equipment, intelligent production line, intelligent workshop and factory management and control, to achieve a highly collaborative, flexible and self-optimized manufacturing system. The core element of a smart factory is not only the ability of the system to optimize the production process and improve efficiency, but also the ability to adapt quickly to environmental changes, and more importantly, it needs to learn new environments in real time and evolve continuously. ”
In the process of promoting the construction of smart factories, Hikrobot has summarized and absorbed the experience gained from serving 17,000+ customers in the past eight years, and has built its own core moat layer by layer.
Jia Yonghua said: "The success of an automation project and a smart factory project is inseparable from a mature and complete IT system. A mature and complete IT system means that the company's business processes are relatively complete, and it is easier to build automation projects or large application system changes on this basis. ”
"On the basis of this IT system, we have built an intelligent equipment layer, which includes industrial sensors, automation equipment, various intelligent devices, mobile robots, including future humanoid robots and other actuators, which can collect production data in real time and provide a basis for subsequent analysis and optimization decisions. ”
At the intelligent production line layer, Hikrobot combines its own product characteristics of multiple varieties and small batches, and implements the intelligence of the production process through the integration of intelligent equipment and execution systems to make "one-click line change" possible in response to the problem of frequent replacement of production lines. Hikrobot quickly changes the line through intelligent means, which greatly improves the production efficiency and competitiveness, further optimizes the efficiency, improves the resource utilization rate and reduces the cost of the intelligent workshop.
At the intelligent workshop level, Hikrobot integrates multiple intelligent production lines and other production resources to form an intelligent control workshop unit with a higher level of intelligence.
Under the hierarchical design of the overall smart factory framework, Hikrobot further subdivides the concept of "flexible intelligent manufacturing", "taking flexibility and openness as the concept of Hikrobot's design, and injecting flexible tentacles into each component, each component, and each algorithm." ”
"We will divide the robot modularization into the most basic and smallest units, through an in-depth understanding of different products and systems, with the help of process orchestration and secondary development, we can combine human resources, products and systems for different scenarios, quickly build solutions to meet the needs of specific scenarios, and finally integrate solutions for different scenarios to form solutions for various sub-industries, so that our products can be quickly implemented on a large scale." In his speech, Jia Yonghua mentioned Hikrobot's experience in forming multi-industry solutions.
Practice has proved that the design idea of the smallest modular unit and the flexible design concept enable Hikrobot to provide accurate customized services and achieve faster project implementation.
Breakthrough layer by layer
Continuously consolidate the underlying technology foundation of flexible and intelligent manufacturing
The reason why Hikrobot can become a pioneer in flexible intelligent manufacturing and continue to lead the development of the industry is because of its solid foundation of flexible intelligent manufacturing underlying technology.
In terms of the deep integration technology of artificial intelligence and robots, intelligent robots can be summarized into three core levels: perception layer, control layer and decision-making layer. Among them, perceptual intelligence is the cornerstone of control and decision-making intelligence, and the foundation for building a "corpus" of intelligent systems.
Jia Yonghua also mentioned the importance of perceptual intelligence: "Just like human eyes, in the future, we will install more 'eyes' on industrial manufacturing and give machines the ability to feel the external world, which is the premise for robots to understand and perform tasks." ”
Focusing on the application characteristics of machine vision, Hikrobot has focused on the technical problems of AI small-sample learning, unsupervised learning and industry large models in recent years, and has launched more than 10 AI algorithm tools to actively promote the penetration and application of AI+ machine vision in more industries. In terms of environmental annotation, based on the characteristics of the large model, Hikrobot has built a panoramic three-dimensional annotation map, which effectively improves the recognition accuracy of various environmental perceptions such as map positioning, point cloud recognition, and visual identity detection, so that the machine has a more comprehensive understanding of the world.
"At the control level, we are based on the optimal control of the model, the operation planning eliminates bias, and through iterative learning, the robot gradually adapts to various environments, and its adaptability will become stronger and stronger in the future, which can improve the autonomy and robustness of control. At the current decision-making level, based on AI path planning capabilities, we learn a large amount of planning path data to enable the network to have expert-level path planning capabilities. At the same time, network inference and budgeting are used to achieve fast distance planning within a millisecond radius. Jia Yonghua said that with the blessing of AI, the production capacity of intelligent systems has been greatly enhanced, and this ability has continuously penetrated into various scenarios, businesses and industries, which can effectively transform AI technology into productivity.
From perception to control to decision-making layer, Hikrobot will achieve flexible intelligent manufacturing of the underlying technology layer by layer. In addition to focusing on the development and innovation of the technology itself, Hikrobot pays more attention to the cooperation and win-win situation of upstream and downstream partners in the industry, and serves every practitioner in the industrial chain.
Jia Yonghua introduced: "For developers, Hikrobot is committed to providing professional software tools based on easy deployment to help developers edit more efficiently. Test and deploy code, provide comprehensive training and certification services, and empower developers with professional capabilities; At the level of technology commercialization, Hikrobot has established joint laboratories with leading enterprises to deeply understand industry needs and priorities through cooperation, and jointly develop products and solutions that are more in line with market demand, so as to strengthen industry insight and enhance the ability to create value for partners; For end users, Hikrobot provides professional and fine services as the basic guarantee, establishes a sound supply system, ensures that every link is strictly controlled, and provides a full range of maintenance services, aiming to respond to customer needs and solve problems quickly in the first time. ”
Take advantage of the momentum
Open a new chapter of flexible and intelligent manufacturing
Relying on its rich experience and solid technical foundation in flexible manufacturing, Hikrobot accurately grasps the trend of market demand, continuously completes self-catching and self-transcendence in the trend of flexible manufacturing, and achieves all-round leadership. In the future, how will Hikrobot refresh the progress bar of flexible manufacturing?
Continue to focus on AI and other technology research
"Looking to the future, we will focus on AI technology, low-code development, and robotics simulation systems. At the conference, Hikrobot revealed the next direction of technical development.
With the support of AI technology, the robot's navigation ability and terminal positioning ability will be significantly improved, and through system-level environmental analysis, the environmental model of the whole life of the robot system can be quickly established, helping the robot to plan autonomously under the premise of fully understanding the environment. In addition, AI will also be an important means of support for dealing with the group control and management of mobile robots.
Jia Yonghua also talked about the role of AI technology in his speech: "The rapid development of AI technology in recent years has benefited various industries including machine vision, logistics and warehousing. ”
It is understood that Hikrobot has achieved very good results in solving some single-point problems in some small-scale models in the past. Complex problems such as positioning, control, and planning, which were previously solved by traditional algorithms, are now found to be more effective with this new AI algorithm. In the future, Hikrobot hopes to keep the complexity to itself and bring simplicity to users. In the future, Hikrobot plans to achieve an accurate understanding of the user's intended environment through large language models, and fully introduce the application of AI and other technologies in the perception, planning, control, and group collaboration of robots, so as to realize various intelligences at the end of the end, improve the autonomy of mobile robots and systems, and greatly broaden the application scenarios of robots.
Deepen the application in the field of commercial circulation
Over the years, Hikrobot's landing projects have mainly focused on the field of industrial manufacturing, forming deep industry barriers. In fact, in the field of commercial circulation, relying on a solid product foundation, Hikrobot has formed commercial circulation solutions such as shelves to people and boxes to people, and there are also rich benchmark cases.
Since 2017, Hikrobot has provided intelligent warehousing solutions for enterprises such as JD.com, DHL, Rishang, FamilyMart and Xinhua Bookstore, not only deploying the largest goods-to-person warehouse solution in China, but also entering overseas markets to provide smart logistics solutions for medicine, footwear and clothing, e-commerce and other fields.
In recent years, Hikrobot has also carried out a series of strengthened deployments for the circulation industry. In 2023, Hikrobot will form an industry-oriented delivery team for commercial circulation, continue to polish its industry delivery experience, and its delivery service level will continue to mature. Hikrobot revealed that in 2024, more and larger projects are being brewed and implemented for commercial circulation.
epilogue
From the overall factory design to the construction of a single production workshop, from the integration of production lines to product portfolios, and the technology from the surface to the inside, the flexible concept of Hikrobot is reflected from the inside to the outside. In the future, with the transformation of the market, more enterprises began to think about their own long-term adaptability, and the concept of "flexibility" will be popularized in more industries.