Hefei, March 26 (Xinhua) -- Smart robots are showing their talents in epidemic prevention and control. Are they needed for a short time or a new development point?
Xinhua News Agency "Xinhua View" reporters Zhang Zi Yun, Ma Xiaocheng, Yang Na
Delivering medical supplies to hospitals, delivering food to guests in quarantined hotels, automatically measuring temperature and disinfection in public places... During the epidemic, the application of intelligent robots in various fields has been promoted rapidly. Is this wave of demand a temporary emergency, or a new node in the development of intelligent robot industry?
Disinfection, distribution, temperature measurement... Robots are on duty
Intelligent robots effectively replace human work, reducing the risk of infection in many jobs during the epidemic.
During the pandemic, the demand for disinfection robots increased dramatically. Hospitals in Wuhan, Shanghai and other places are using robots to disinfect. These disinfection robots can carry out autonomous mobile multi-point disinfection for the environment and air, making up for the deficiency of traditional fixed air disinfection machine, ultraviolet disinfection and other methods. The disinfection robot can also focus on the disinfection of patients and high frequency activity areas of medical care.
The latest robot, developed by Hefei Hagong Kuxun Intelligent Technology Co., LTD, can also automatically detect the body temperature of a person. "The robot has been used in Wuhan, Xi 'an, Hefei and other cities," said Zhou Yangyang, founder of the company.
Delivering medicine and food to patients has become the "job" of robots in many places. These robots can automatically open the door, close the door and take the elevator. After the medical staff put the medicine into the cabin, the robot will deliver the medicine to the patient according to the input ward number and bed number, minimizing the risk of infection for the medical staff. In addition, some robots play the role of "propaganda ambassador", 24 hours non-stop in the hospital hall, public service area of epidemic prevention and control publicity.
In addition to applications in sensitive environments, robots are also beginning to serve the wider urban response to COVID-19. In Xiangcheng District, Suzhou city, tracked self-propelled air delivery spray robot instead of manual disinfection, an average of one hour can destroy more than 40,000 square meters. At Zhangjiang ARTIFICIAL Intelligence Island in Shanghai, autonomous vehicle startup Neolithic's unmanned disinfecting vehicles sterilize the entire road surface at regular times every day and warn against people gathering without masks.
Iflytek developed a smart medical assistant telephone robot that can make 900 calls in one minute at the same time to investigate, inform and visit residents. "In just two months, it has been applied in 30 provinces and regions across the country, with a total follow-up of more than 37 million people." Iflytek chairman Liu Qingfeng said.
The "unmanned delivery strategy", which has been the focus of logistics companies, has also been implemented at a faster pace during the epidemic. Jingdong and Meituan have launched logistics robots. Jd.com has launched smart delivery vehicles in Wuhan, which reportedly account for 70 percent of the delivery of medical supplies to a designated hospital.
"After consumers place an order, Meituan intelligent distribution and scheduling system will assign the order to the unmanned delivery vehicle, which will automatically drive to the contactless delivery point in the destination community after picking up the goods at the shopping site. The whole process is isolated from human contact." Li Da, product director of Meituan unmanned vehicle distribution center, said that the workload of unmanned vehicles has increased significantly in the past two months, with more than 30 vehicles in deployment.
Epidemic prevention and control is accelerating the application of robots
Industry insiders believe that service robots can quickly "take up posts" during the epidemic, thanks to the accumulation of original technology in the industry, and at the same time, to some extent, broaden and deepen the existing application scenarios.
China Robot Industry Development Report 2019 shows that the global robot market continues to grow, and service robots usher in a golden period of development. In 2019, the global robot market will reach more than $29.4 billion, of which $9.46 billion is for service robots. China's service robot market is estimated to reach $2.2 billion, accounting for about 23 percent of the market.
Both the autonomous driving technology needed by delivery robots and the intelligent speech recognition technology relied on by telephone robots have been developed rapidly in recent years. Zhang Tao, CEO of Shenzhen-based Purdue Technology, said, "Taking autonomous driving technology as an example, commercialization scenarios have been increasing in recent years, and low-speed autonomous driving has been commercialized more quickly."
After the outbreak, Purdue Technology quickly rolled out intelligent delivery robots to more than 100 hospitals and quarantine sites across the country. Purdue has already accumulated experience in low-speed autonomous driving, especially in the catering scene of delivery robots.
Previously, a number of logistics companies have increased their efforts to carry out unmanned delivery, but more are in the trial commercial stage. The need for contactless distribution during the pandemic has greatly promoted the commercialization of this technology.
In addition to areas directly related to the epidemic, the advancement of intelligent robots in some related areas is also remarkable.
Take children's education and escort robots as an example. Affected by school closures, the demand for home-based education is rising rapidly. Iflytek, based on tracking statistics of more than 750,000 AI applications on its cloud platform, found that after the outbreak of the epidemic, the usage of education and learning apps increased by 226% compared with the same period last year. The brand data of Alpha Egg, a child care robot, shows that since the outbreak, the amount of data used in the background has increased by more than 10% than usual.
Will there be sustained growth after the outbreak?
By 2020, China plans to realize the mass production and application of smart home service robots and smart public service robots, according to a three-year action plan for promoting the development of a New generation of ARTIFICIAL intelligence Industry (2018-2020) released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in December 2017.
Zhang tao said that the performance of service robots in the epidemic has been recognized by the market, and people's acceptance and familiarity with service robots have further improved, and the market demand will continue to rise. For example, in restaurants and office buildings, the "contactless safe food delivery" service can solve the problem that it is difficult for enterprises to return to work and has been applied in more and more places.
Previously, the public's impression of restaurant robots was still "marketing gimmick", and the epidemic has accelerated the attention and demand for food delivery robots in catering enterprises. A video of a food delivery robot on Douyin has more than 60 million views.
Industry insiders believe that restaurant robots should be a new option in the catering industry, which has long faced problems of recruitment, retention and high costs. As technology matures and costs fall, robots are increasingly used in greeting guests, ordering food and cooking dishes, and consumers are no longer looking at robots as gimmicks, but more concerned about their use value.
It is understood that haidilao, Grandma's, Guangzhou restaurant and other catering enterprises have started to use restaurant robots. Many companies said they will increase the application of service robots after the epidemic. "Iflytek will accelerate the development of artificial intelligence guided medical treatment, smart phone robots and other fields." Liu qingfeng said.
Industry insiders believe that China has huge market potential and development space in the field of service robots with the further improvement of artificial intelligence, 5G, big data and other technologies. It is expected that the whole industry will accelerate after the epidemic. China's service robot market is expected to reach nearly $4 billion by 2021, according to Qianzhan Industry Research Institute.
Experts suggested accelerating research and development to improve intelligent voice, image recognition, algorithms and other technologies to further expand application scenarios. Wang Chen, chief engineer of the National Engineering Laboratory of Big Data System Software at Tsinghua University, said that today's truly mature robot applications are mostly reflected in replacing mechanization and repetitive labor, and the intelligent degree of robots should be improved through machine learning to drive more scenario-based applications.
