Have Chinese Robots Bid Farewell To The Era Of Lack Of Core And Soul?

Five years ago, Song Jiqiang, president of Intel Asia Research Institute, gave a very interesting speech titled—Let China's service robots no longer "lack cores and souls".

Today, the clock is turned to 5 years later, not only service robots, but also Chinese robots bid farewell to the era of lack of core and soul?

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When it comes to the "stuck neck" in the field of science and technology, many people will think of "lack of core and soul". "Core" refers to the chip, and "soul" refers to the core basic software such as the operating system. For a long time, my country has been highly dependent on foreign technology in core hardware production and basic software development, and technology security cannot be ignored.

At that time, Dean Song Jiqiang said that many service robots in that era were completely controlled by humans in terms of movement, remote control and assisted walking, and they did not have intelligence themselves, while warehousing logistics, sweeping machines, and automatic patrol robots had a certain degree of mobility. Only by adding some interactive intelligence and perception capabilities can we generate customer value.

From the application point of view, the future development trend is that a suitable chip is needed to solve all problems from perception to decision-making, so that Chinese robots will no longer be "short of cores and souls".

Without a chip, the robot is just an empty shell.

As the "heart" of the robot, the current chip of the robot is mainly divided into four types: FPGA, MCU, DSP and IGBT.

FPGA chips can be called "programmable chips", "semi-customized chips" and "universal chips". The biggest feature of the FPGA chip is that the specific functions of the chip are determined by the user configuration after the manufacture is completed. When applied in the field of robotics, it has the advantages of high speed, parallelism, extremely rich computing and pin resources, flexible functions, direct implementation of algorithms by hardware, simple and efficient operand access mechanism, and direct detection of the underlying hardware by means of development and debugging.

MCU is the largest category among the core main control chips of robots. Small robots value the cost and power consumption of MCUs, general-purpose robots value the precise motor control of MCUs, and high-end robots need MCUs to take into account both computing power and scalability.

The DSP chip is used in the field of industrial robots, which is equivalent to playing the role of joints. With the control of DSP, the robot responds more quickly and moves more precisely. Industrial robots need to process a large amount of data in their work. As the application of industrial robots becomes more and more extensive and popular, DSP chips are used more and more in this area, and their importance, economy and practicality will be reflected.

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But at present, most of these chips are still monopolized by foreign markets, and there is very little domestic success. The field of robot chips is still the home field of foreign companies.

In addition to FPGA, MCU, DSP, etc., CPU is also the main chip in the field of industrial control.

With the development of robots, it is necessary to realize control, grasping point analysis, visual target recognition, etc. in more and more environments, all of which require computing power support, and only one FPGA is not enough. In the field of CPU products, in recent years, domestic brands and brands have also entered. For example, Loongson Zhongke's embedded CPU products can be widely used in the field of industrial control.

In 2001, the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences began to develop the Loongson processor, and received strong support from the Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 863, 973, and nuclear high-level projects, and completed ten years of technology accumulation.

In 2008, Loongson Zhongke was established with the support of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Beijing Municipal Government. In 2010, Loongson Technology completed its first financing and started market-oriented operations. In order to break the monopoly of "Wintel" ecology and "AA ecology" in the IT industry (Wintel refers to Intel and Microsoft, and the AA ecosystem refers to ARM and Google's parent company Alphabet), since 2011, Loongson has obtained the technology license of MIPS , R&D and production of related CPU products.

In 2020, from the perspective of complete independence, Loongson Zhongke announced that it would no longer use MIPS to develop new products, and launched LoongArch, an instruction set with full autonomy. After more than 20 years, in July last year, Loongson Zhongke developed the first fully domestic PC processor "Loongson 3A5000" based on this architecture.

Hu Weiwu, chairman of Loongson Zhongke, once said that the reason why he chose to develop his own domestic CPU was because he felt that such a big country as China could not live without its own CPU.

As my country's first manufacturer of CPU processors with completely independent property rights, it successfully developed and released a purely domestic CPU processor, marking a major breakthrough in my country's computer infrastructure, and also means that my country's high-tech Great achievements have been made on the road of independent research and development.

In addition to Loongson Zhongke, as a new research and development institution in Shandong Province, Shandong SIASUN Industrial Software Research Institute relies on the Key Laboratory of Robotic Cross-platform Intelligent Control Technology in Shandong Province to give full play to the technological research and development advantages of SIASUN Robotics Group and Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Committed to achieving self-control.

Shandong SIASUN Industrial Software Research Institute focuses on building an independent and controllable industrial software control platform, and has released PLC (Programmable Logic Controller), CNC (CNC Machine Tool Controller), RC (Robot Controller), MES (Manufacturing Execution System) ) and more than 30 intelligent manufacturing software and hardware products, which also broke through the development bottleneck of "lack of core and brain" in domestic industrial manufacturing.

"You can't always use other people's yesterday to dress up your own tomorrow."

As the core robot controller of the robot's "brain", it is still monopolized by foreign technology. Domestic robot controller manufacturers are relatively weak in competitiveness, with a market share of less than 10%. Independent breakthroughs to ensure the safety of industrial production.

The core technology cannot be obtained by relying on alms, nor can it be bought with money. The focus of the second half of China's economic development is to achieve high-quality development and achieve independent control of core technologies. The road is long, but it must be done with heart.

In the past two years, with the strong support of national policies, my country's robot industry has embarked on a road to rise. After years of hard work and development, the situation of "lack of core and soul" and "big but not strong" in China's robot industry is gradually improving.

During the long journey, the foundation of the development path is to strengthen technology, make good products, create an ecology, and continuously meet the needs of intelligent transformation for users. Domestic enterprises can only achieve technological self-reliance if they truly do not get "stuck".

"An industry without independent core technology is rootless." The same is true for the robotics industry. There are still two layers under the CPU chip and operating system software to "get to the bottom". One is the short board of my country's information industry, and the other is that to build an independent information technology system requires an independent command system. The information industry based on foreign command systems cannot support the development of the Chinese nation. Great Rejuvenation.

Semiconductor companies have accelerated the innovation and upgrading of robots and market development by virtue of their strong underlying chip capabilities. Chips and the underlying intelligent platform have become the key links to enhance the value of robots. Domestic semiconductor companies are bringing new changes to the robot industry by building higher-performance underlying software and hardware platforms for robots.