With the continuous development and maturity of technologies such as AI perception, positioning, navigation and driving, robots have been applied in more and more scenarios, and various functional categories have been extended. A few days ago, “Yosemite”, which 36 krypton came into contact with, is a company that develops lawn mowing robots.
Yosemite was established in 2021. It is mainly based on RTK GPS (Real-time Dynamic Measurement and Positioning Technology) multi-sensor fusion algorithm. It provides an integrated solution of mowing robots for overseas markets, which can replace manual remote control of refined and automated mowing. control. It is understood that the company's founding team has started researching lawn mowing robots as early as 2018, and officially launched the research and development of intelligent lawn mower systems in 2020. Today, more than 20 products have been successfully developed.
Mowing the lawn seems to be a low-cost, common job, but it is actually a market with a huge stock and a fragmented market share. According to data from market research firm Grand View Research, the global lawn mower market size in 2019 was US$28.5 billion (about 181.7 billion yuan), and it is expected to reach US$44.1 billion (about 2812 yuan) by 2027. The average compound growth rate reached 5.6%.
Li Jianyong, founder of Yosemite, told 36氪 that lawn mowers are already a mature market, with a global annual shipment of 25 million units, of which about 8.6 million units are shipped in the North American market, and the mainstream usage scenario is for household lawns. take care of. But the vast majority are still gasoline-powered lawn mowers that require manual operation, and the utilization rate of smart lawn mowers is close to zero.
In the environment of growing market demand for lawn mowers and insufficient intelligence, the lawn mower market is ushering in two development trends. One is to switch from gasoline power to lithium electric power in terms of power, and the other is to change from manual operation to operation in terms of operation. The intelligent operation of the machine enables fully automatic mowing without human intervention.
Therefore, Yosemite mainly faces foreign markets and provides overall solutions for mowing robots for terminal brands. Compared with the existing thread-embedded lawn mowing robot solution, the company's lawn mowing robot can achieve complete multi-process processing and use high-precision satellite positioning to solve problems such as lawn slippage, complex boundaries, large areas, and obstacle avoidance. At the same time, users only need one-button control on the mobile phone to let the mowing robot intelligently complete the mowing work, and can also perform remote monitoring and set working hours.
From a technical point of view, the Yosemite lawn mowing robot has core technologies such as RTK GPS algorithm, heterogeneous twin high-precision map, multi-antenna technology, long-distance communication technology, and intelligent path planning, among which the company's large-scale system engineering capabilities are the core. , which can highly integrate different modules and control the cost advantage from an engineering perspective.
As a multi-sensor fusion slow-speed automatic driving system for outdoor applications, the lawn mowing robot has the characteristics of many technical points, complex systems, and complex scenes. For example, it includes intelligent subsystems such as perception, planning, and decision-making related to autonomous driving, to core modules such as positioning, communication, and motion control, which is a huge challenge to the team's system architecture and technical capabilities.
At the same time, the lawn mowing robot is oriented to the market where mass shipments are made to families, and the requirements for product cost are very strict. In Li Jianyong's view, only products with a sufficiently competitive cost can quickly gain customer recognition.
In response to these challenges, Yosemite has a talent advantage that cannot be underestimated. The company has a team of RTK GPS modules and experts, involving RTK algorithms, GPS receivers, mid-range radio frequency, RTK & IMU sensor fusion algorithms and other technologies. They have accumulated over 50% of R&D expenditure on hard technology products under project management in the past ten years. It has profound accumulation and experience in the research and development of large-scale, complex and multi-domain comprehensive products.
Among them, the founder of the company, Li Jianyong, holds a master's degree in automatic control from Southeast University. He has worked in domestic leading communication companies and other companies, and has participated in wireless LTE pre-research, baseband product research and development, baseband chip project management and other projects. He has a total of 6 invention patents and 3 PCTs.
The advantages of the core team enable the company to rebuild the algorithm from the underlying core technology, and achieve system-level algorithm enhancement while reducing technology costs, thereby improving product performance to an industry-leading level.
Yosemite lawn mower
Specifically, the core advantage of the Yosemite lawn mowing robot is to solve the two difficulties of "clean cutting" and "large area cost".
1. "Cut clean" advantage
Due to the large difference between indoor and outdoor working environments, outdoor lawns usually encounter problems such as dew slippage after rain, uneven ground, bumps, etc. These are problems that indoor robots are difficult to solve, and more stringent requirements are put forward for robot positioning technology.
At present, there are two main technical solutions for positioning of intelligent lawn mowing robots in the industry, one is the buried-line solution based on inertial navigation, and the other is the non-embedded-line solution.
Simply put, the buried-line solution is the mainstream technical solution at present, and companies such as Bosch, Bosch and Husqvarna have adopted this solution. The advantage of this solution is that the cost is low, but the disadvantage is that precise positioning cannot be achieved, resulting in the problem of unclean cutting. At the same time, the cost of manual thread embedding is high, about 200 euros to 400 euros, and the cost will increase as the lawn area increases, and it takes a long time and has poor layout flexibility. Therefore, the mowing effect of the buried thread scheme is not ideal in large-area lawns.
In contrast, the non-embedded solution adopted by Yosemite can solve the problem of precise positioning. It adopts RTK GPS technology as the leading technology, and integrates other sensor fusion algorithms such as IMU and vision to form a new positioning solution. However, the problem with RTK GPS technology is that if the robot is blocked by trees when working, its positioning signal will be weakened or even lost, or when it is close to the house, it cannot solve the problem of multipath effect caused by signal reflection.
Therefore, the company proposed two solutions for the positioning problem. One is to directly suppress the signal multipath problem and find the shortest working path; For example, the computer vision solution is integrated with GPS to solve the problem of signal positioning.
2. Solve the problem of "large area cost"
Compared with Europe, the lawn area of North American households is larger, often reaching thousands of square meters. Therefore, when the lawn mower robot solves the problem of precise positioning of large-scale lawns, it must also ensure that the cost is controllable and reduce the user's labor after the robot works. Cut-up cost.
Li Jianyong mentioned that in fact, the non-embedded solution is also subdivided into three technical paths, namely multi-point positioning solution, RTK GPS solution, and vision solution. Among them, the multi-point positioning solution can solve the problem of large-area positioning, but it is difficult to control the cost increase; the visual solution looks good, but the biggest problem is that its commercial landing time for the mass delivery market is uncontrollable; and the cost of the RTK GPS solution There is room for further reduction, which can achieve controllable cost and controllable performance at the same time.
In addition, cost is also a crucial link in the commercial landing of lawn mowing robots. Li Jianyong mentioned that the company plans to strengthen R&D investment and build the underlying technology competitiveness in core technology modules, so as to achieve performance and cost leadership in the industry, and reduce the cost of key modules and components from 1,000 yuan to 100 yuan. .
In terms of business model, Yosemite currently mainly includes high-voltage, high-power brushless motor controllers, and a complete set of intelligent lawn mower control systems, which include navigation and positioning, map path planning, and electronic control peripherals.
Among them, the company's intelligent lawn mower control system is expected to be shipped in the first half of next year, and it will give priority to the To B market, relying on the path of traditional brands to spread the volume, complete the upgrading of the stock market, and enable traditional manufacturing enterprises to catch up In the era of robots, realize the upgrading of the industrial chain.
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