Humanoid Robot Breeding New Opportunities Landing Scene Becomes The Key To Future Development

Recently, the 2022 World Robot Conference was held in Beijing. More than 130 companies brought more than 500 exhibits, and more than 30 of them were the world's first new products.

From the layout of the exhibition, the conference paid great attention to the application of robots in the landing scene. According to the way of "robot + application scene", robots + agriculture, robots + medical care, robots + logistics and other related enterprises appeared one by one. It also means that the idea of replacing humans with robots to do heavy production-line work is becoming a reality.

According to CRIA data statistics, in 2018, the average number of industrial robots in the world has reached 99 units / 10,000 people, among which Singapore has reached 831 units / 10,000 people, South Korea has reached 774 units / 10,000 people, Germany has reached 338 units / 10,000 people, China has reached 140 units / 10,000 people, an increase of 34.3% compared with 2017. The demand of industrial robots in the automobile manufacturing industry, 3C industry, chemical industry, metal processing industry, food manufacturing field is growing, showing a good trend of development.

It's worth noting that the humanoid robot section was a hit with visitors at the expo, the first such section at the World Robot Conference. Earlier, Tesla and Xiaomi announced the launch of humanoid robots, making the field a hot topic in the market.

In August 2021, Musk unveiled concept drawings and video of Optimus, a humanoid robot, at Tesla's first AI open house. It is expected to be completed in 2022, with the first version ready for production in 2023. The Optimus will be lightweight, with a screen on the head that scans the outside world, a human-like hand, two axles for balance, and a total of 40 electromechanical actuators.

On the night of Aug. 11, Xiaomi unveiled its humanoid robot, CyberOne. According to the information released by Xiaomi, the robot has only 21 degrees of freedom (also known as the "motion execution unit") and can recognize six categories of 45 kinds of human semantic emotions. The cost is between 600,000 yuan and 700,000 yuan, and it cannot be mass-produced at present.

HumanoidRobot (HumanoidRobot), also known as anthropomorphic robot, has human-like perception, decision-making, behavior and interaction capabilities. It has human-like appearance, sensory system, intelligent way of thinking, control system and decision-making ability, and finally manifests "human-like behavior".

Hailed as the ultimate form of AI, humanoid robots are designed to interact with artificial tools and environments to assist or even replace human production and life. In terms of application scenarios, it is mainly divided into business scenarios and personal/family application scenarios, covering logistics, food delivery, cleaning, companionship, entertainment and other application fields.

According to a securities researcher, compared with industrial robots and service robots, humanoid robots are more versatile in application scenarios. Because their humanoid shapes are more acceptable, they are likely to break the barriers of factories, businesses and households and become a truly universal product. Second, it serves as a natural commercial entry point, and a lot of commercial value will be reflected in humanoid robots in the future.

According to the Oriental Wealth Securities report, humanoid robots are expected to be the solution, considering that there is a large global labor gap in the future. According to the report of McKinsey, it is expected that the global labor shortage will be about 100 million people by 2030. Assuming that 50% of the gap is replaced by humanoid robots, combined with the selling price of Tesla humanoid robots at 200,000 to 300,000 yuan, the market space of humanoid robots for labor alone will be more than 10 trillion yuan. And with the improvement of humanoid robot intelligence, the application scenarios will be more extensive, which may be far beyond the market space expected by the report.

The report also pointed out that the three most core and most expensive parts of industrial robots are reducer, servo motor and controller, which the bank believes may also be the most opportunities in the humanoid robot industry chain.

Cui Renzhi, investment director of Yida Capital, told the media that like smartphones and smart cars, humanoid robots are also a kind of intelligent terminal facing the 5G era. One of the characteristics of this round of technological revolution is that big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies are deeply integrated with knowledge and data of vertical industries. Head technology companies tend to build capabilities in multi-dimension of cloud network terminal core. By means of hardware embedding, data accumulation and software upgrading, intelligent terminals are constantly optimized for use experience.

However, some people in the industry point out that humanoid robots are still not really mature products in the world. Lu Hanchen, director of the Robotics Industry Research Institute of Gao Gong, said that Asimo and Boston Dynamics, among others, have launched humanoid robots in the past, but from the perspective of landing application, it can be said that they are not successful.

Lu said that domestic research on humanoid robots is relatively late, and the industry believes that humanoid machines are less likely to land in the short term. "Because the current application scenario of humanoid robots is not clear, so it is still a little early to talk about the market scale and market space. All this is based on the premise that humanoid robots can be applied to the ground, and the potential market space is at least 100 billion."

When it comes to the reasons for the difficult landing, Lu Han Chen said on the one hand is the problem of the technical level. , he points out, humanoid robots if the segmentation, there are at least hundreds of joints, compared with current robot products, the difficulty level of ascension is not a multiple of hardware and software, but exponential, seen in this way, it is the past didn't attack the problem, the top company Lu Han zichen said more willing to believe that need longer time to solve the problem; The second problem is industrial application. More attention should be paid to the application scenarios of humanoid robots, because the definition of application scenarios directly affects the rigidity of their requirements.

According to Times Financial news, Zhang Weimin, deputy director of the Institute of Robotics at Beijing Institute of Technology, said that the humanoid robot exhibited by Tesla is not technically difficult for the industry, but it is still difficult and costly to launch in the industrial stage.

Ten years ago, a humanoid robot cost about 2 million yuan, Zhang said. Now the components produced by domestic enterprises are gradually replacing imported products, but they have not yet reached the mass production stage, and the cost has dropped a little. "The development of the robot industry relies on the development of related core components, and some high-end devices still rely on imports."

For all these reasons, humanoid robots are not the mainstream of investment in the industry, which can be directly confirmed by the investment and financing data. According to the "China Robot Industry Development Report (2022)", in 2021, there were 238 investment and financing events in China's robot industry. According to the statistics of industrial robots, service robots and special robots, industrial robots still accounted for the highest proportion of financing category.

According to media disclosure, a number of venture capital institutions have said that the robot is a huge track, the underlying core technology is the same, the progress of humanoid robots depends on the overall further development of artificial intelligence level. In terms of current investment, it is more important to have real application scenarios downstream, especially for B-end enterprises, where cost and ROI are the biggest considerations.

Previously, YouBixuan technology related personnel have told Caijing that the current industry is still in a relatively early stage of development, the market incremental potential is huge, product form innovation and commercial exploration is still very big room, also need more practitioners to work together to promote the rapid development of humanoid robot industry.

In general, the industry generally believes that humanoid robots will be a huge market, but it will take a long time to land, as soon as the technology is available and the landing scene is realized, the market will emerge.