Business Robot "Circle Of Friends": 5G Will Be The Key Point Expected By The Industry

Compared with the consumption level robot market, the market has experienced the bubble process in the past, and the development of commercial robot market is still in its initial stage.

This is also a market demanding technology. How to find and cut into the industry and explore with the ecosystem is a topic they are exploring.

In the recently held "BATi2019 big bay international science and Technology Summit", Ecovacs commercial robot Co., CEO Gao Qian told the twenty-first Century economic news reporter that To B and To C are two different genes, and the logic of thinking, decision-making process and delivery process are different. The industry level products are different from the standardized C terminal products, and the software and hardware should be customized according to the scene. In addition, the B side also needs a special operation and engineering team to help customers solve problems in actual scenarios.

The technological development process is also a major driving indicator, not only artificial intelligence, which is growing with the robot industry, but also the coming 5G.

"AI development to this stage, technology is not yet fully mature, how can enterprises use existing technology to complete products and commercial landing. This is the biggest improvement we have made in developing products. " She pointed out that based on this, the industry has experienced three changes in the development of thinking.

With the growing maturity of domestic robots and manufacturing industry chains, frequent interactions and common growth between ecological chains are accelerating the further localization and steady development of the B robot market.

Logic evolution of B terminal robot

According to Gao Qian, Ecovacs commercial robot Co., Ltd. has been exploring for a long time in the financial field. Based on this, it has gone through three iterations with the whole business service robot industry. In the early days, robots in bank outlets were more reflected in the display of technology sense by auxiliary banks, and the substantial role they could play was not large. In the 2 stage, banks and robotics companies are thinking about which links or scenarios can play a full role.

Is the role of a robot a lobby manager or a lobby assistant? Only after the definition is clear can we define the direction and focus of future robot's iteration. Gao Qian pointed out to reporters.

In the current 3 stage, with the trend of fewer and fewer users entering the banking network, how will the intelligent service scheme of bank outlets be carried out? For a robot enterprise, it is a challenging but necessary process to create a solution service.

"We must upgrade products according to the needs of banks. This may include the emergence of new products, so that the main products will be combined, and even form an ecosystem, so that the financial system can better integrate with products." Gao said.

She further pointed out that at present, Ecovacs commercially ploughed the financial market in the B terminal market, including not only banks, but also insurance, securities and other pan financial sectors, and the company is also looking forward to the retail sector.

Purdue technology focuses on the catering industry robot market in the catering industry. Zhang Tao, founder and CEO of the company, told reporters on twenty-first Century economic report that there were several considerations for entering the catering scene.

Rigid demand and high frequency are the basis for determining the value of a product, and the catering market is large enough to be a 100 billion level market theoretically. At the same time, because the scene is relatively complex and the consistency is weak, the feeding robot requires a higher technical threshold. So far, this is a relatively decentralized competitive market, which can be relatively relaxed for start-up companies in terms of communication between accounts and premium.

"This market is also experiencing the process of user education." Zhang Tao said that when the product technology is perfect, when the efficiency of the product reaches a certain target, and the company can reduce the cost of the product and enable the customer to control the investment return period within one year, the market can grow relatively fast.

Since the second half of this year, the head enterprises, represented by seabed fishing, began to introduce such robots into the restaurants in large quantities. Zhang Tao believed that after confirming the feasibility of technology, the demand that had been squeezed for many years was finally released.

It is also understood that Ecovacs's commercial robot's parent company, Ecovacs robot Limited by Share Ltd, is also investing in robots. Gao Qian told the twenty-first Century economic news reporter that Ecovacs now focuses more on the field of service-oriented robots, and gradually released the industrial robot scene under the promotion of the state and technology. At present, Ecovacs has invested in a software and hardware platform for industrial terminal robots.

"B robot is relatively open in the environment, the application is very difficult." She continues to say that from an individual perspective, she will pay attention to the investment opportunities of industrial robots in the industrial Internet field. "I think the industrial Internet is one of the deficiencies in our country at present. When you have many robot terminal collectors, what do you do after collecting data? How to design a complete system of industrial Internet is a relative part of our current shortage.

In terms of the development process, Gao Qian believes that the B robot market is actually still in its infancy, compared with some of the consumer robot market that has experienced the past bubble process.

"Relatively conservative prediction is still in the initial stage." She added that every robotic company had gone through a period of confusion and direction. Some of the head companies are still polishing the product, but they have found a clear scenario and ploughed it in. But on the whole, it is far from reaching the stage of deep ploughing. "Doing a thing well in the B end scenario can really bring value. It is a future development path for B end robotic company, and it must also go. So I think that tooling will be a part of the development of B terminal robots in the future.

Linkage effect of industrial chain

In the key link of the robot industry chain, the role of software and key parts can not be replaced, which will even affect the product life cycle and market recognition.

Gao told reporters that the development of the robot market is not only dependent on the hardware itself, but also closely related to the software adaption of the product.

Behind this is the construction process of robot ecology. For example, in the consumer class robot scene, after the laser radar technology helps to plan the route, there is no market bubble for the sweeping robot, but in contrast, the core of the educational robot is content. If the content does not continue, it will easily lead to idle robot hardware, so in this area, we need to better build the content ecology to achieve the desired results.

Huan Chuang technology founder and CEO Zhou Kun also pointed out that the robot industry development process has three core technologies: the need for neural system thinking, perception network, sports system. They correspond to AI capability, sensor and radar technology.

"These three items are very critical. The perception network has long been neglected and underestimated. Until the last two or three years, the situation has been changed, especially in the field of vehicular driverless vehicles, which has led to the development of sensors." He continued to say that it included the laser radar industry of Huan Chuang technology. In the industrial market, the company currently involves industrial detection and high-end manufacturing, including aircraft, automobile manufacturing and handheld navigation.

Zhou Kun told reporters on twenty-first Century economic report that the chip of laser radar industry is the way to go in the future. This is also the reason why Huan Chuang technology has some layout in this field.

"The most important thing is to grasp the industry." He further explained that although the chip industry has a long investment cycle, a large amount of capital needed or even prone to technical risks, this is precisely the test of the company's understanding and mastery of the chip industry.

It is not only the technology of chip industry, but also the resource of chip industry chain. "We can get some support from the chip factories with better cooperation in history, and investment can be greatly reduced. If they don't have confidence in you and don't know how much the chip will eventually sell, they will set up a very high cost. Zhou Kun said that in the industry chain, trusted chip manufacturing partners as a support is particularly important.

As for how to meet the technical requirements in the field of precision manufacturing, Zhou Kun explains that foreign related products often use expensive hardware devices to make sensors. Huan Chuang technology chooses to lower hardware requirements, and has made breakthroughs in core algorithms. "There is a precision rule to achieve domestic substitution, we achieve the same performance, but the price cost will be controlled at a very low level, at half or even 1/3, which is an important rule for domestic enterprises to replace foreign products."

An industry insider also told reporters that in general, the development of domestic lidar technology is easy to be stuck in the consistency of manufacturing process. However, the industry chain manufacturers will find out where the problem is and concentrate on solving the problem. "We have invested in some core parts enterprises, and clearly feel that they are growing up. I believe that one day, localization will be achieved in most ways."

Zhang Tao pointed out to reporters that the core of controlling the cost of robot products lies in the systematic setting of products. For example, positioning and navigation routines will use specially expensive sensors and relatively less robust algorithms, but they can also choose sensor cost budgets at relatively acceptable levels, and use better algorithms to compensate sensor performance. Or mechatronics design, such as motor driven, wheel and so on, can be driven by an entire set of components. Now it can make an integrated motor by itself. This will not only reduce the cost and the number of components, but also increase the reliability.

The driving force of emerging technologies

From the bottom technology perspective, the development of AI technology is actually a great driving force for the development of the robotics industry. Only when AI technology really penetrates into specific scenarios and plays a role, robot technology can be better developed.

This is especially true for B end industry robots. Based on this platform, robots can accumulate more vertical data, so that the AI model can be more iterative. But man-machine coupling still needs some time matching and training, not to mention the current AI technology is still in the process of evolution.

Gao Qian told reporters on twenty-first Century economic report that there had been several dismissal of robot incidents and robot business crises in the past two years. What impressed her especially was that the Rethink robot, which had raised 1 billion in September 2018 and continued to fill Bezos, announced its closure.

"I find that in the field of commercial robotics in 2B, compared with internet start-ups, this track is very slow, and in the relatively slow track, we must find our niche in pursuit of rapid development." She continued to say that one reason for the closure of Rethink was that some relatively advanced but not mature technologies were put into the product, and ultimately did not achieve very good results.

Just before that, Google acknowledged that its intelligent service assistant still has artificial assistance behind it. Gao Qian told the twenty-first Century business news reporter that Natural Language Processing technology has not completely broken through at present, and Ecovacs business has always arranged the operation team to provide assistance.

"This is an important process of human-machine coupling." She says that by constantly training robots and improving the operational models from data and algorithms to scenes, we can get close to the results of free interaction.

Therefore, we must find a balance between innovation and continuity, and find the advantage scenario. At the same time, we should have a relatively complete team with different resources according to the resource requirements.

5G is another key point that the industry looks forward to. "We are looking forward to the arrival of 5G, which will bring a lot of benefits to the robot industry, but it is not yet fully commercialized." Gao pointed out that at present, the ability to process local ends, such as images and interactions, depends on data transmission speed and network configuration.

And the robot application scenario has always advocated "cloud, edge and end", training in the cloud, the accumulation of local processing power at the end side, the closer to the local processing, the combination of "cloud, edge and end", plus the construction of the 5G backbone network, the robot can do more things, can deal with the effect and speed faster, the growth ability will be stronger.