With the emergence of market demand, what are the application directions of humanoid robot commercialization?

“In the entire industrial sector, the automotive industry’s large-scale production characteristics and the ultimate pursuit of efficiency and cost reduction have led to the most urgent need for automated production.” Jiao Jichao told reporters, “At present, the overall level of automation in the automotive industry is high, and many process links on the assembly line have been completed by the industrial robot arm, but there are still many tasks that need to be completed manually.” For example, important detection links on the final assembly line need to be identified manually. “Bending into the car to check seat belts, opening parts and other tasks require more motion control and improvisation than a robotic arm can do, so humanoid robots are needed to do these tasks.”

CP405 In addition, the rise in labor costs has also created demand for humanoid robots to “work”. “Some of the hard work can be handed over to humanoid robots.” Jiao Jichao said.

Jiao Jichao said that compared with the service market and the household consumer market, the industrial scene is less sensitive to cost, but the controllability requirements are higher, which is conducive to the rapid application of humanoid robots and large-scale replication. In addition to the automotive manufacturing field, 3C manufacturing, clothing manufacturing and other industries also need humanoid robots to participate in flexible production.

Dong Xiaojian told reporters that the company’s first landing application scenario is agricultural picking, through humanoid robots to achieve high-precision picking. Labor shortages in agriculture have created a huge market for humanoid robots. Fruit cultivation in many areas of China has basically achieved large-scale standardization and dwarfing, which has created an environment for the large-scale application of humanoid robots. “We are targeting the agricultural picking scene and leveraging the company’s technological advantages in stereo vision and hand-eye servo system.”

Ding Han, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the Academic Committee of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, said that humanoid robots are more suitable for low-load, high-flexibility, high-collaboration and multi-complex task scenarios, in addition to handling palletizing, assembly line production and other industrial fields are expected to land, the future in the space station service, health care and other directions have great development potential.

Face many challenges

The humanoid robot industry has a bright future. According to the “Humanoid robot Industry Research Report” released at the conference, it is expected that the market size of China’s humanoid robot will be about 2.76 billion yuan in 2024, and will reach 75 billion yuan in 2029, accounting for 32.7% of the world’s total, ranking first in the world; By 2035, China’s humanoid robot market is expected to reach 300 billion yuan.

“From the core components alone, humanoid robots will bring a big market opportunity.” Ford robot software business manager Jiang Ming told the China Securities Journal reporter, “We are currently developing the CP405 ‘Tianchain’s first T1’ humanoid robot with 71 degrees of freedom. That means 71 motors and 71 gearboxes, and more for other parts.”

Haitong International analysts believe that humanoid robot sales will significantly affect the market size of core components such as hollow cups and frameless torque motors.

However, the development of the humanoid robot industry still faces many challenges. “Reducing costs is an important issue for the industry. In addition, reliability and stability must pass.” Jiao said.

“Taking into account cost reduction and other factors, the company adopts the whole industry chain self-research and production method, large to machine tool equipment and harmonic reducer, small to tools and tools, we are their own research and development, build cost advantages.” Jiang Ming said.

“Humanoid robots and industrial robots partially overlap in the industry chain, but the overall industry chain is still immature.” Dinghan said that humanoid robots integrate multiple fields of technology, involving ontology and environmental intelligent perception, and need to carry out a lot of scientific research in hardware systems such as mechanical ontology, sensing systems, servo systems and control systems, and software systems such as sensor core algorithms. To make the humanoid robot industry bigger, we need to break through the technical bottleneck of core components, need collaborative innovation of production, government, education, research and use, and need more enterprises to adhere to it for a long time.