From isolation to openness and unity

Unlike servo, the development of motion control products in the field of robotics has gone through two different periods.

In the first period, industrial robots were in the early stage of development. Despite nearly half a century of development, only 60,000 industrial robots were sold globally in 2009, and the domestic industrial robot market was basically in the “wild age”.

During this period, the general background of the development of the global manufacturing industry was the popularity of the automobile industry and 3C electronics industry. Toyota, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz and other major car manufacturers prop up the backbone of domestic industry; Japanese electronics manufacturers have built up a huge electronic empire around the world.

In the field of industrial robots, major car factories have nurtured four families, and the Japanese 3C industry has nurtured robot companies such as EPSON and YAMAHA. But sales were so low that no supplier was willing to develop controllers for the industrial robot industry.

Therefore, everyone operates independently and adopts a closed vertical mode: they develop their own control system, and restrict other core components with the help of non-open communication protocols. As a result, the programming languages of each controller are incompatible with each other, the process documents cannot be universal, and each robot ontology vendor only provides in-depth services for specific large customers or even manages the integration business themselves.

The most interesting thing is that at that time, because each product is not common, the maintenance of a specific product can only find a specific manufacturer to do, and maintenance is also an important source of profit for each manufacturer at that time, so there was once a few electric motor maintenance price and a new body price is equivalent.

At that time, the industrial pattern of closed vertical robots was the trend of the industry in the historical period when there were few downstream industries and few customers.

The second was the gradual development of China as the workshop of the world, and the birth of the most complete industrial sectors, with different levels of market segmentation, large and small companies, numerous process nodes. In addition, the Chinese market itself is quite broad in terms of both geographical and industrial product demand, so localized channels and integrated services have gradually become the focus of thinking of various manufacturers.

The needs of large, small and medium-sized enterprises in China’s vast and complex manufacturing industry are far more extensive than those of overseas main car manufacturers and 3C customers. The sales growth rate of China’s industrial robots in the past decade and the market space in the coming years are also much larger than those of overseas robots.

Such a wide range of demands, promote the control system from decentralized to unified, “cars on the same track, the same text”, rather than rushing in each direction. This kind of push and turn, in the machine tool, PLC, laser and other industries into the multi-industry application explosion has occurred.

On the one hand, a more unified controller can significantly reduce BOM costs and R&D amortization, creating a cost-effective product. On the other hand, both small and large developers can do secondary development based on a unified controller, continuing the precipitation process, rather than switching between multiple controllers and repeating development.

In addition, the unified controller selected after full competition in the market has strong usability, reduces the learning cost of the majority of operators, and cultivates the habit of use.

Therefore, after two stages of development, the field of robot controller gradually evolved into two factions *.

One is composed of professional third-party controller manufacturers, which focus on the development of controller products, but do not do ontology, collaborative servo drive and servo motor products. They use open and unified communication protocols to provide out-of-the-box Turnkey control systems for general-purpose industrial ontology manufacturers.

In order to deal with the complex downstream industry segmentation, the products of these third-party controller manufacturers are embedded with the most complete process library of the industry, simple and easy to learn operation design, to create cost-effective products, and can also provide deep secondary development interface for the end-users of self-use robots, training customers’ ability to use the controller.

The other focuses on core components such as self-developed controllers, servo drives and servo motors. The self-developed core components and ontology should be better or differentiated than the professional third-party products in the whole industry to have a chance. This kind of enterprise will bear a high cost of research and development, generally will be deeply bound to several terminal customers, and should have strong business and capital cushion ability.

* From a higher point of view, almost every industry in the manufacturing industry is the result of the long-term competition and integration of the above two paths, finally reaching a dynamic equilibrium. And successful businesses can emerge from both paths. The former such as Befu Beckhoff, B&R, Codesys, Bochu electronics, the latter such as Huichuan, Eston, Dazu laser.

Almost all industries cannot escape this evolutionary path: first, enterprises establish their own vertical integration system through vertical integration; When the industry grows into an explosive period, open collaborative system manufacturers join hands with other core components and ontology/equipment manufacturers of the industrial chain, compete with vertical self-research manufacturers, and eventually occupy most of the market share.