Despite the adverse impact of the pandemic, China’s AGV/AMR market maintained a high growth trend in 2022, especially in some innovative segments that exceeded expectations.

According to Veco Robotics statistics, the sales volume of mobile robots in the Chinese market in 2022 was about 87,000 units, a year-on-year growth of 28.4%, and the market size was 11.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year growth of 24.7%. It is expected that the Chinese mobile robot market will maintain a growth rate of about 30% in 2023.

In 2022, the development trend of China’s mobile robots will change from a slowdown at the beginning of the year to a rapid growth at the end of the year. From the perspective of application fields, there will be significant growth in new energy vehicles, lithium batteries, photovoltaic and other industries. The projects in these industries are of large scale and reproducible.

In the field of new energy vehicle manufacturing, in recent years, the rapid development of new energy vehicles, intelligent upgrading of automobile production has become the trend of the entire industry, making mobile robots have been widely used, mobile robots have been applied to stamping, welding, painting, final assembly of the four production links of logistics distribution, to achieve large and small parts distribution, ordering parts online, standard parts supply and other operations, Instead of traditional trailers and manual handling.

In the field of lithium electric manufacturing, mobile robots have been involved in the coating, roll cutting, die cutting, winding, cell assembly and module PACK of lithium battery production, showing the characteristics of intelligence, efficiency and flexibility, and can automatically connect with machine equipment. Through pre-scheduling, partition task management, large-scale cluster scheduling and other algorithms, the automation degree of logistics in the factory is effectively improved. Improve the field production efficiency, greatly reduce the cost of labor.

In the field of photovoltaic manufacturing, mobile robots are widely used in photovoltaic crystal, chip, battery, components and other processes to achieve automatic distribution of materials, inter-process transfer, line inventory management, high-precision docking with the machine and other functions, replacing manual to solve the handling difficulties of special materials such as long, overweight, fragile, etc., to meet the environmental cleanliness requirements of the production workshop. Reduce EHS risk.

The upgrade of intelligent manufacturing is not simply replacing human beings with robots to produce products, but a whole set of different systems. The first step of intelligent manufacturing is to open up logistics, use mobile robots to transport various items, and physically connect various discrete systems. If human beings are still used to maintain the flow of items, it will be difficult to ensure smooth connection, not to mention inefficient. With the advancement of intelligent manufacturing, the market demand for future mobile robots will continue to expand.

The AGV/AMR market continues to grow

In the category of mobile robots, AGV and AMR are developing continuously, but they are slightly different from each other in terms of application fields. AGV is mainly used in warehousing and logistics, automobile manufacturing, 3C electronics, new energy, food and beverage and other industries, while AMR is mainly used in 3C electronics, auto parts, new energy, semiconductor, medical, logistics and other fields. This is also determined by the characteristics of each.

AMR can be automatically navigated, without laying track in advance, easy to expand and change the working area, making the production more flexible and intelligent. Nowadays, the market demand is increasingly refined, fragmented and diversified, and users have higher and higher requirements on the delivery cycle, which promotes the enterprise to improve the capacity of on-demand production. Facing the fast pace of flexible production, AMR became the best choice for many companies.

However, at present, both laser navigation and visual navigation have certain limitations and cannot be guaranteed to be applicable in all cases, especially in complex environments such as factories. Therefore, in some cases, it is still necessary to arrange a small number of artificial markers or add auxiliary navigation to achieve effective navigation operation. In the future, with the breakthrough of natural navigation technology, Only by solving the adaptability problem in feature scarce environment and high dynamic environment can AMR usher in a new round of explosive development.