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An industry boom of service robots is surging towards us.
In the past 2021, the global sales of service robots reached 14.6 billion US dollars, with an annual growth rate of 32.2%, creating the peak growth rate since 2016. Among them, the scale of China's service robot market is 39.18 billion yuan, accounting for more than 1/4.
In just one year, the number of Chinese service robot companies has skyrocketed by 78.92% to 105,000; there have also been 113 financings on the service robot track, with a total financing amount exceeding 44 billion yuan.
More importantly, now is just the beginning.
A third-party report predicts that the annual sales of service robots in China is expected to reach 61.35 billion yuan in 2023, doubling from 2021.
The "14th Five-Year" Robot Industry Development Plan 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 by an average annual growth 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 will also be gradually implemented.
There is no doubt that the development of the entire industry has approached a "tipping point":
Technological breakthroughs such as 5G, artificial intelligence, flexible joints on the supply side, and trend changes such as the epidemic situation on the demand side and the upgrading of digital industries are turning service robots from "functional" to "intelligent", from concept pilot to full popularization. Market size grows.
For many years, we have believed that robots will be as pervasive as smartphones throughout human society.
As early as February 2007, Bill Gates predicted in the "Global Science" magazine that in the near future, every family will have a robot.
But the reality is that, to this day, this dream is still far from reality.
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 eight consecutive years since 2013.
However, unlike industrial robots that mainly work in "unmanned environments" and pay more attention to efficiency and accuracy, the application scenarios of service robots require 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 capable of environmental perception and human-computer interaction
Service robots must rely on comprehensive technological breakthroughs in different fields, such as new materials, artificial intelligence, flexible joints, and sensors, in order to truly achieve product maturity.
At the same time, more complex technical requirements mean higher costs. This further restricts the commercial popularity of service robots.
However, the situation has gradually changed.
On the demand side, since 2019, the raging of the new crown epidemic has made "contactless service" a rigid demand. From hospitals to hotels, from distribution to inspections, in the process of epidemic prevention and control and resumption of work and production, a large number of Service robots take to work.
Even in recent years, more and more representatives of the industry have suggested that robots should be used to replace manual repetitive labor under the conditions of meeting the requirements of economy, technology and reliability, so as to alleviate the increasing "labor shortage".
More importantly, on the supply side, there are solutions for the two major bottlenecks in the maturity of service robots.
The first bottleneck is the level of intelligence.
In the past, due to the limitation of artificial intelligence capabilities, service robots could only perform limited fixed jobs like feature phones. Food delivery workers could not do cleaning, and inspection workers 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 the fields of deep learning, knowledge graph, scene recognition, human-computer interaction, reasoning and cognition, and service robots are about to achieve a subversive upgrade. :
Just as smartphones replace feature phones, the currently widely used service robots with a single function will gradually be replaced by service robots with general intelligence that can provide multi-functional and multi-modal service experiences.
The upgrade of China's communication infrastructure has made the landing of "cloud intelligent robots" possible.
The movement of the robot needs to rely on joints. In the past, with the increase of joints, the amount of computation would continue to increase, which would consume a large amount of computing power and energy of the robot, resulting in an increase in the size, energy consumption and cost of the robot, which greatly affected the application and popularization of service robots.
The "cloud intelligent robot" is the architecture proposed by the Chinese robot unicorn company Dada. It separates the "brain" of the robot responsible for computing work from the ontology, and puts 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 is needed to connect each joint, and the whole system becomes an infinitely scalable system that can make any complex robot.
The premise of this idea is to establish a complete and high-speed "cloud-network-terminal" system. Through a powerful cloud brain, a high-speed and reliable neural network, and a large number of robot bodies, the whole system can be completed for us. Serve.
A major development of the 5G network is that it can shorten the transmission delay of network signals to less than 10 milliseconds. Correspondingly, the signal transmission speed of human nerves, the delay from the brain to the joints and muscles generally needs 180 ~240ms.
At the same time, the "East Data and Western Calculation" project officially launched by the state this year has also put forward very high technical requirements for the data transmission of the backbone network. In the Tencent data center, the delay does not exceed 20 milliseconds in principle.
This means that, through the "brain" that is a thousand kilometers away, to support the intelligent robot 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 robots.
In the past, the vast majority of service robots had feet but no hands, with rollers to move and even interact, but most of them did not have flexible arms and could not serve us like real people.
However, facing the future, no matter whether it is delivering goods, taking care of the elderly, organizing housework, or handling farm work, the more intelligent the intelligent robot, the more it needs to have a strong "hands-on ability".
This bottleneck is the last barrier to overcoming high-end robots: in order for service robots to obtain flexible arms and realize complex combined actions, they must have intelligent, miniaturized, and high-strength flexible joints.
This core component accounts for 70% of the cost of intelligent robots. It is also a shortcoming of my country's robot industry. It has long been monopolized by the "four families" of foreign robots.
And now, domestic robot companies have made up for this key shortcoming through independent research and development.
At present, acommon perception in the industry is that the next ten years will surely become the "golden decade" of service robots.
If the epidemic has opened a window for the application of service robots, then the severe challenges of an aging population and a serious shortage of labor, as major challenges for Chinese society in the future, will surely promote more industrial robots and service robots, more and more Intelligence, which is becoming more and more pervasive, helps us do more work.
In this process, with the introduction of information and communication, biotechnology, new energy, new materials, artificial intelligence and other technologies, the robot industry will also stand on the cusp of taking off, ushering in a qualitative change from function to intelligence, continuous upgrading and leapfrog development , and finally achieve large-scale application popularization in the whole society.
Perhaps, in the near future, just like Bill Gates' prediction, we will usher in the era of "robots in every house".
At that time, the cloud intelligent robot will become the third computer of human beings after PC and mobile phone. "Huang Xiaoqing said.
While industrial robots continue to attack and 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 growth against the trend and are expected to increase by 20.7% year-on-year in 2020.