"If intelligent cars are the crown of intelligent manufacturing, then intelligent robots will be the crown of machine intelligence." "He Xiaopeng, chairman of Xiaopeng Automobile, once said on Weibo.
When the above views were published, it was Xiaopeng Automobile that announced the establishment of the second heavy ecological company Penghang intelligence and released the first intelligent machine horse third generation prototype "xiaopeng". As xiaopeng automobile ecological enterprise, Penghang Intelligent will transfer the system and thinking used in automobiles to the research and development and manufacturing of intelligent robots.
Under the banner of crossover held high by the automotive industry chain, what kind of spark has been struck between robots and intelligent vehicles?
When the car-building forces step into the robot
Xiao Peng is not the first to play with robots.
Xiaomi unveiled the first generation of its own bionic robot CyberDog "Iron Egg" and announced the establishment of a Xiaomi Robotics lab at its new product launch event. CyberDog is equipped with a high-precision environmental sensing system, with 11 high-precision sensors all over the body, enabling it to sense images, light, distance, speed, sound and other environmental information to restore a more realistic biological response.
Lei jun said that bionic quadruped robot is based on the global open source community to carry out self-research and innovation, integrating xiaomi's hardware and software research and development capabilities, self-research and development of high-performance motors, and building on xiaomi's RESEARCH and development of AI visual voice algorithm, robot system and motion algorithm.
Robin Li, chairman and CEO of Baidu, unveiled the "car robot" at baidu World Conference 2021. He pointed out that in the future, cars will become car robots, and robots will look a lot like cars. Car robots are characterized by autonomous driving, intelligent assistants, loyal companions and self-learning.
Wechat screenshots _20211119085117
In Li's vision, Baidu car robots are capable of L5 level autonomous driving, multi-mode interaction such as language and face recognition, analyzing users' potential needs and actively providing services. In addition, car robots are capable of self-learning and continuous upgrading, making them intelligent bodies serving various scenarios.
In this year's Tesla AI Day, Musk brought "Tesla Bot", a humanoid robot. Compared with Xiaomi and Xiaopeng, Tesla's robot has a more radical concept. It is 1.73 meters tall, pulls 68kg hard, and has a speed of 8km/h. It is expected to hit the market next year.
"I want tesla robots to do all the things that humans don't want to do," Musk said.
As a traditional car company, Hyundai Motor has also begun to expand into the field of robotics. In June, Hyundai announced the completion of its acquisition of a controlling stake in Boston Dynamics. The deal, which was first disclosed in late 2020, left Hyundai Motor Group with an 80 percent stake in Boston Dynamics.
Boston Dynamics, which has been working with robotics for more than 20 years, has already unveiled a number of robots, including SpotMini.
In September, Hyundai launched a studio focused on Ultimate Mobility Vehicle (UMV), hoping to redefine the Vehicle through a combination of robotics and wheeled motion technology.
This year, Hyundai-Kia unveiled the TIGER, its second UMV and first unmanned concept car. Equipped with four wheeled robot legs, TIGER can switch between wheel-driven and foot-driven locomotion. It has a full range of foot and wheel locomotion systems, 360° universal movement, and a range of sensors for remote observation.
Notably, TIGER is a modular platform that connects to different devices for different applications, such as scientific exploration in extreme remote areas or the delivery of disaster relief materials in disaster areas.
From this point of view, The concept of Hyundai and Xiaopeng is similar. Both of them combine modern automobile technology and robot, but they are facing different fields. Xiaopeng prefers to C, while Hyundai prefers more professional and specialized application fields. Tesla's humanoid robot concept is broader, moving away from automotive technology and bringing its own machine vision, algorithms and manufacturing techniques to robotics.
Behind the trend
Autonomous driving and robotics share three key technologies: environment awareness, planning and decision making, and executive control. Among them, environmental perception is the most important and basic one. Autonomous vehicles and robots use sensors to acquire information about the environment, but they also use maps and some IoT technologies to improve their perception.
Dr. Ming Liu, director of the Robotics and Multi-Sensing Laboratory at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and an IEEE expert on autonomous driving and robotics, told JIwe.com that autonomous driving technology is a sub-category of robotics from a technical perspective.
"The accumulation of perception in autonomous driving has some relevance to the robotics industry," he noted.
Intelligent learning and iteration of robots in areas such as image recognition, sensor fusion, and processing of uncertain situations has become a critical path in the evolution of autonomous vehicle technology, Said John Hennessy, chairman of the board of Alphabet Inc., at the 2021 World Robot Conference.
This coincides with Dr. Liu Ming's point of view. After a hundred years of development, the automobile industry has become a mature and prosperous market. Traditional automobile enterprises are seeking to transform, and Internet high-tech enterprises are also seeking to develop in the direction of hardware after having a certain software foundation in the fierce market competition. Such a two-way trend is becoming a normal situation in the era of new car manufacturing, which also gives enterprises in the industrial chain a reason to cross into the field of robotics. They may have strong software and algorithm research and development capabilities, such as Baidu and Xiaomi, or have both manufacturing and research capabilities, such as Xiaopeng and Tesla.
In fact, the application of robots has penetrated into various industries, especially service robots. Dr Liu pointed out that robots are already being used very well in the service sector.
According to the China Robot Industry Development Report (2021) released by the China Association of Electronics, the global robot market has maintained growth, with service robots becoming an important supporting force. Since 2016, the annual average growth rate of the global service robot market has reached 23.8%, and it is expected to reach 12.526 billion US dollars in 2021.
The market size of home service robots is estimated to be $8.2 billion, the market size of medical service robots is estimated to be $1.3 billion, and the market size of public service robots is estimated to be $3.1 billion, with the market size of home service robots accounting for the highest 65%. By 2023, the global service robot market is expected to exceed 20.1 billion US dollars, and the market size of upstream and downstream related industries will also grow simultaneously.
The report pointed out that China's robot market has entered a period of steady growth. Although the scale of China's robot market declined slightly in 2019 due to market demand fluctuations, the robot market showed a trend of accelerated recovery due to the first breakthrough of the epidemic. A large number of "contactless" services also provide a broader application space for robots.
The outline of China's 14th Five-Year Plan also clearly states that we will promote the optimization and upgrading of the manufacturing sector, carry out smart and green manufacturing projects, foster advanced manufacturing clusters, and promote the innovative development of high-end manufacturing industries, including robotics.
The broad market space and certain technical similarity may become another growth outlet for automobile enterprises, but there are still many differences between robots and automobiles in a wide range of application scenarios.
Dr. Liu Ming pointed out that, in essence, legged robots, service robots and autonomous driving technology are not the same category of technology, and there are great differences in the requirements of application scenarios and sensor accuracy, durability, reliability and other requirements. Considering the relevance of sensor schemes, uav and quadruped robot are suitable for cross-border research and development.
From the concept to the final mass production, there is no doubt that it will take a long time, but also face many challenges and problems. Lei jun said at the press conference that CyberDog is very expensive. The cost of the Nvidia chip alone has reached 3,000 yuan. The investment behind the development of a robot is obvious, but it is because so many companies choose to think in a new way about the interaction between new technologies and different applications that we can see a future full of imagination.
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