With the conclusion of the fourth World Robot Conference, people's hope for robots to become real friends of human beings has been disappointed again. For all their tricks and different landing scenarios, revolutionary AI products have yet to emerge, and humanoid, walking, service-oriented robots are rare.
Robots have been a science fiction image ever since they appeared in people's eyes, so much so that after years of development, robots in movies have never come into reality, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time before they reached that point. But now, perhaps more than ever, we want the robotics industry to move forward.
The 176 million only children born between 1980 and 2016, who were pampered as children, are now engulfed by huge pressure to provide for them. When I grow up, my father, mother, grandparents and grandparents are all getting old. If two only children marry, there will be 12 elderly people on their shoulders.
People who can't afford to live in nursing homes have to queue up, and people who can't afford to work for them. The pension problem in Chinese society has become unusually prominent. With the rise of China's robot industry, robot pension has become a new direction for the industry to explore.
Robots are good, but not good enough
At the World Robot Conference, we saw a Tustar four-axis manipulator that can open a bottle cap in the Arctic Ocean. UFACTORY's seven-axis robot arm can write calligraphy; It follows media reports that home assistants designed by the University of California at Berkeley and developed by Rethink Robotics have learned to fold a towel in 15 minutes; Laundroid, a Japanese robot, is faster, folding in four minutes. Although the efficiency of these robots is shaking one's head, it has given people a glimpse of the future of robot housework. Companies like Zhongruifuning, which focuses on high-end robots and has a product line of robots for the elderly, are also emerging in China.
At present, the development of the domestic robot industry has also been on the right track. Since 2013, China has become the world's largest robot application market, and the service robot market is expanding rapidly. Household service robots account for more than 60% of the service robot market, including cleaning, escort, children's entertainment and education and many other segments. According to the 2018 China Robot Industry Development Report, China's service robot market is expected to reach $1.84 billion in 2018, up about 43.9% year on year, higher than the global service robot market growth.
However, behind the huge volume, it is getting wider and wider horizontally and making slow progress vertically.
According to the report "Analysis of market Size and Development Trend of Household Service Robots in 2018", the market share of disabled robots with the highest technical content and most closely related to elderly care accounted for less than 0.1%, and more of them were leisure robots (30.88%) and homework robots (67.65%).
As a very vertical segmentation field, elderly robot has very high requirements on technology, including helping the elderly to turn over and help the elderly to fall. In addition, the company, communication, cooking and other various functions, the degree of integration is difficult, high complexity, and the film rendered out of the imagination of the image does not know how many years.
Fear of difficulty is a normal psychology, so at present, most enterprises on the market even if involved in the field of elderly robot, more is to use and children's products general scheme, does not contain the ability to act, only stay in the basic communication dialogue, video communication, etc., can be classified as leisure and entertainment robot.
Homework robots include sweeping robots, window cleaning robots, etc., which are obviously only intelligent of white electricity and have the characteristics of simple function and low integration. Combined with peripheral products such as health monitoring and emergency alarm, the intelligent pension market constructed by all the above intelligent devices accounts for less than 1% of the entire pension industry.
Compared with more and more mature software applications, robots also need to combine artificial intelligence, but more need is the ability to act. When we mindlessly raise our hands, pick up a glass of water, and raise it to our lips, the dexterity of each joint is a miracle of evolution and a goal that robots will have to pursue for many years.
The middle class is not so vulnerable, but robot companies are
Middle-aged Beijing under the Flu has aroused the motivation of many young people to raise their children. Many friends began to call the old people at home occasionally, but in front of the reality that they are getting old at a fast speed, there is no 1.8 million in the card for emergencies, and there is no ten-day or eight-day holiday in OA to accompany the old people. No amount of phone calls and wechat messages are useless. Many people have no choice but to hire a nurse.
Some netizens contributed to the price of the nursing industry: the price of hospital nurses in first-tier and second-tier cities is 200 to 300 yuan per day, and the price of family nurses is 4000 to 5000 yuan per month. Depending on the patient's condition and the difficulty of care, it is not fluctuating, because there is no room for lower prices. And if the elderly are incapacitated too soon, their children, struggling in the cities, may earn just enough to pay their carers. This assumes that the recent surge in rents has been effectively contained.
The cost of moving disabled or semi-disabled people to nursing homes is similar. The monthly fee for private nursing homes is 5000+, while the price for public nursing homes is relatively cheap. However, it has been reported since 2013 that it takes 100 years to wait in line to enter the nursing homes.
It has become mainstream to say that China's middle class is vulnerable, and more of the lower middle class are not. In this case, if there is a highly integrated advanced intelligent robot that can replace the caregiver, will people be able to afford it?
It's possible.
At cheetah Robot Night in March, Cheetah Mobile unveiled the Leopard Secret Robot, which it claims is the first truly useful robot for security patrol and other scenarios. Fu Sheng, CEO of Cheetah Mobile, did not announce the price of the machine, but released a rental price of 2,999 yuan per month, which is equivalent to 54,000 yuan after 18 months. Pan Shiyi, chairman of SOHO China, said on stage that the price is very affordable if it can replace security guards and work 24 hours a day without having to pay five social insurance and one housing fund.
For middle and lower middle class, 2999 a month is actually affordable, even if the one-time payment of 50,000 yuan is not too big a expenditure. Mainstream service robots in the industry are generally priced within 200,000 yuan, which is just the price of a private car. If we can really replace human caregivers and play the role of taking care of the elderly, even if it is 500,000 or 2 million, it is much cheaper than sending the elderly to the nursing home, and the pressure of monthly payment is always smaller than buying a house.
If people are ready to spend 2,999 yuan a month to welcome nS-5, are robot companies ready?
The leading robotics company in the industry is Boston Dynamics, arguably the coolest company in the world. The company has developed futuristic animal robots, as well as humanoid robots that can perform difficult maneuvers such as backflips, and has a dominant position in bipedal humanoid robots.
Many of you have seen the Boston Dynamics video or the giFs that have circulated widely online. However, such a company has not made a profit in 26 years. Boston Dynamics, which was acquired by Google in 2013, was sold to SoftBank just three years later due to difficulties in liquidate. "A startup of our size can't spend more than 30 percent of its resources on something that will take 10 years to make progress," says Mr. Rosenberg of Google's Replicant business unit.
There is always a conflict between research and commercialization, and even Google's size can't support a future-oriented company like Boston Dynamics.
Chinese rival Boston Dynamics' Iron Man Technology is also developing bipedal humanoid robots, but the company's co-founder, Manor, told the media that commercialization of bipedal robots is still a long way off. "In fact, the development of many start-ups is often inseparable from the support of capital. Just like our first two rounds of financing, investors have given us enough patience and support, which makes our start-up look very challenging in the general trend of more and more enterprises pursuing short and quick returns."
Business society is not obliged by nature to fund research; it is all about giving back. It is companies that are vulnerable to the demands of capital for cash and future-oriented research.
How to accompany you, my father and mother?
The Master said, "When your parents are with you, you will not travel far. You will travel well."
Ergeng Video released a short film called "How are the Young People who fled Beijing doing now?", which mainly interviewed a group of people who had turned from Beijing to Hang Floating. From it, we can see a group of young faces who struggled again in Hangzhou after being thwarted in realizing their dreams in Beijing. To put it more grandly, all the people who go out to fight are contributing to the education environment of the next generation. Say some duty, just to improve their quality of life, earn the money you want to earn is also a matter of course. But the parents who stay at home, who will accompany?
Although urbanization has been accelerated in recent years, the proportion of the elderly driven by the floating population has been increasing year by year, which to some extent shows that the ideal state of settling down in other places, taking over their parents and sharing the family life has begun to sprout. In fact, the migration of the elderly in China is generally centered on their children, and the proportion of assisted migration has exceeded 50%. In other words, even if they live with their children, more than half of the reasons are to take care of their grandchildren, not to mention that few people are able to pick up their parents.
From the perspective of the elderly, there is little difference between the young people in the video who do not want to spend time with their parents and the more young people who do not have time to spend time with their parents, because one day we ourselves will find that the social isolation of the elderly, whether accompanied by relatives or not, is cruel. A report by the Institute of Statistical Science of the National Bureau of Statistics on the social tracking survey of the Elderly in China shows that there is no significant difference in the family isolation experienced by the migrant and non-migrant elderly. The lack of children's company and certain proportion of widowhood are part of the reasons for the deterioration of physical and mental condition of the "left-behind" elderly. Meanwhile, the old people who come to the children's side need to adapt to the new environment and rebuild social relations from zero, resulting in social isolation will also have a negative impact on physical and mental health.
However, constant, even daily companionship is unrealistic for young people in the workplace. Getting enough sleep may be an unrealistic goal for anyone who starts a regimen before their 30s. Young parents, burdened with the responsibility of raising the next generation, sometimes turn helplessly to their phones and tablets to cope with their children's excess energy.
But the company of an older person is not as easy to fool around with as a child with a blank SLATE.
Children who can play with a smartphone in three minutes force their parents to become smart and gamified, and pay high prices for child-accompanying robots. A child can pass the day with a toy that does nothing but listen to nursery songs and watch cartoons. But parents with blurred eyes and slow reflexes don't need stories, they need tea, water and daily care.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, as of 2016, China had 150 million people over the age of 65 insured, and the number will continue to rise. The robotics industry is growing at a normal pace, but China's elderly can't wait.
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