“We initially thought this was a once-in-a-decade opportunity for the Internet, but the more we thought about it, the more we thought it was a once-in-a-century opportunity, similar to the industrial revolution that invented electricity.” On May 18, at Tencent’s 2023 general meeting of shareholders, Tencent Chairman and CEO Ma Huateng issued such a feeling.

“As we all know, we have gone through three industrial revolutions, each of which brought new developments in science and technology and had a profound impact on social production and way of life.” Wu Qilin, chairman and Chief Technology officer (CTO) of Elephant Robot, said that it is now in the fourth industrial revolution, represented by cloud computing, the Internet of Things, big data, robots, etc., which is promoting the change of social production and lifestyle, especially the recent rise and rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) large model, which has further promoted robots. Especially the wave of humanoid robots.

At present, AI technology is gradually being deeply embedded in all aspects of China’s industrial production and high-end manufacturing. Industry insiders are calling it an “exciting time.”

Shao Tianlan, founder of Mecamander Robots, is also very excited about the application of AI large models in industry. “Now the large model gives a very good idea, it has hundreds of billions of levels of reference, through a variety of training data across the modes, when the basic capability is done, the large model can produce a more advanced capability.” “This capability can replace a lot of work that engineers can do, and when you combine that capability, we think there’s an opportunity to take robotics to the next level, and that’s a huge opportunity that we see right now.” With large models, the market could be 10 or even 100 times larger, and that’s something we’re very excited about right now.”

Bionic robot business inquiries doubled

“The big model is driving a whole new wave of AI industry. Now all industries are exploring the integration with large models.” Liu Kewei, CTO of IFLYtek Cloud Platform Business Group, said at the site of a recent “IFLYtek AI TechDay” event that robots, as the core and most comprehensive application carrier of artificial intelligence, will inevitably have an important role in promoting our productivity through the combination of robots and large models.

“From the data of our platform, we can see that the volume of our entire service robot has increased by 88% in the past half year, and the volume of bionic robot business consultation has increased by 125%.” What is even more encouraging is that previously robot applications may have been more concentrated in some service areas, and now we can see robot applications in industry, manufacturing, agriculture and even logistics industries, and there is a welcome phenomenon of industry-wide penetration.” Liu Kewei said.

The reporter saw at the scene that relying on AI technology and IFLYtek’s “robot super brain platform”, A tracked robot can quickly build motion and navigation capabilities: after a series of exploration and map construction, the robot can easily achieve a navigation task from point A to point B, while also having real-time position display and navigation obstacle avoidance capabilities.

These cases are just the beginning. In fact, AI has already been applied in industrial production. Recently, the reporter saw in the Shenzhen branch of a German company that the company’s laser welding equipment has begun to use technology for some high-end equipment manufacturing. For example, for the laser welding of copper wires in the motor, a laboratory person in charge of the company said, “We mainly use machine vision to judge, some copper wires with too much distance will not be welded after artificial intelligence judgment, but it will also be marked one by one, and later by manual intervention; And for some relatively large but acceptable range of gaps, machine vision recognition to the special state, will automatically adjust the welding parameters, including welding trajectory, power, etc., in short, as far as possible to make the equipment intelligent response to various conditions to complete the welding.”

“This device uses machine vision and artificial intelligence, by importing a large number of production pictures in the early stage, and then manually marking the correct part, after a certain amount of accumulation, the AI model can find out the rule to know what you really want, it will filter out all interference factors, and it can also assist in post-welding quality detection.” The person in charge of the above laboratory said.

Iflytek also introduced a case of AI enabled industrial production to reporters. In order to assist the digital transformation of the steel industry and build a modern production line, Shougang Qian ‘an Iron and Steel Co., LTD., in Qian ‘an City, Hebei Province, used iFLYtek acoustic imager to carry out a visual leakage speed scan of the vacuum of the 12 closed boxes and branch pipes in the sintering plant, which directly shortened the inspection time of more than 10 hours in the past to 90 minutes, and 22 gas leakage points were detected in the plant. Make the location of gas leaks in steel plants “visible”. If it is assumed that the annual output of the plant is about 1 million tons, the overhaul can save 3 million to 5 million KWH of electricity for the plant (a total of about 900,000 yuan).